Cincinnatus BLOG *** Political Commentary - Social Commentary

“Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty” - Albert Einstein.

I grew up in the Bronx where the public school system, with a few exceptions, was at best second-class. We who were fortunate enough to be born Irish, Italian, German, Polish and Hispanic Catholics were sent by our parents to “parochial school.” The nickels, dimes and quarters thrown into the Sunday collection were used to build a parish school next to virtually every church — just as the Emperor Charlemagne, the putative founder of public education, had once commanded. As a group, we eschewed public funding in order to ensure the proper education of our children.

The Irish priests and nuns of my youth dedicated themselves to ensuring that all children entrusted to their care were well educated — even if it took an occasional wrap on the knuckles to achieve that goal. In this way, countless millions of lives were made better. One nun or lay teacher at the head of a class of 50 boys and girls taught from eight in the morning until 3 in the afternoon.

Why did it work so well? It wasn’t public money; we didn’t receive any.  It sure wasn’t the small class size, or an abundance of resources. It was the dedication of the teachers, parents and the community that made the system work. Looking at today’s greatly reduced church attendance, it’s obvious that the system may not have made very many of us devout Catholics, but it made Catholics educated and productive citizens.

It is an article of faith in the United States that we can solve any problem if only we throw enough money at it. No objective evidence could possibly shake this mystical belief. For example, in the United States we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world. We spent $7,421 per capita as compared to about $3,500 countries with universal national health care systems. We don’t receive better care in the U.S. than the French or Germans; we just pay a lot more for it.

Education is no different  - The United States is the single greatest investor in education in the world. For the latest year in which we have comparative data, 2004, expenditures per student for the United States were $9,368 at the combined elementary and secondary level, which was 42 percent higher than the average of $6,604 for the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). At the postsecondary level, U.S. expenditures per student were $22,476, which was nearly twice as high as the OECD average of $11,418.

Despite this expenditure, the 2006 Program for International Assessment, which measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, found the U.S. ranked 25^th out of 30 in math and 24^th in Science. Maybe it is time to deal with root causes rather than continue to delude ourselves into to believing that by just spending a little more money we will fix a failed system. I don’t mean to imply that all school districts have all the resources they need; only that in the aggregate we already spend the money and do not reap the appropriate value for our education dollar.

First, we have to admit we have systemic disease in our education system and two aspirin won’t cure it. Second, you can only improve your average by bringing up the lower 50% not by dragging the top 50% down to the least common denominator. Our children are bright and our goal must be to maximize their talents and stoke their ambitions. Seems simple, but it runs counter to most of our education policies.

Our inner city public school systems are a disaster.  The simplistic conclusion reached by policymakers is that if we simply spend more money the gap between whites, African-Americans, Latinos and lower income students will simply disappear. Wishful thinking is also not an answer.

A recent report found that only about half (53%) of all young people in the nation’s 50 largest cities are graduating from high school on time. Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap, prepared for America’s Promise Alliance by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, shows that despite some progress made by several of these cities between 1995-2005, the average graduation rate of the 50 largest cities is well below the national average of 71 percent, and there remains an 18 percentage point urban- suburban gap.

Let’s address head-on the greatest challenge facing our education system: incorporating the African-American community into it. The data clearly shows that all policies to date have been a colossal failure. If I were asked whom to put in charge of solving the problem my answer would be Bill Cosby. Doctor Cosby has a firm grasp of the sociological problems within the community, the need to involve the whole family, to make doctors and lawyers as cool as athletes and rock stars and not to disadvantage our children with an illiterate and incomprehensible dialect that separates African-Americans from the rest of American society. We also need to redistribute some of our education dollars into the inner cities, but money alone will do little unless we take on the bigger issues and get the dedication of parents, teachers and the community.

By the way, what does Reverend Al and Reverend Jesse and all the others do with the Sunday collection and corporate donations? Maybe they should model themselves after all those anonymous Irish priests and nuns who educated millions. It’s not about building a public relations edifice for your personal political aggrandizement, but about doing the hard work of making sure every child in the community gets and education. While they should continue to fight for every penny of public funding, they might consider the old proverb “charity begins at home,” and put some of the money they collect to work educating their community. Let me be sacrilegious, but honest: The African-American community would have been far better of if they were born Catholics rather than Baptists.

Second, we have departed from our historical tradition of assimilation, the key to which is to communicate in a common language, which in the US, of course, is English. For the record, I encourage everyone to speak multiple languages. In my case my younger children grew up in France and have two maternal languages, French and English. In addition, like most Europeans they have second and third languages; they also speak either Spanish or Italian. This is quite different from wanting to make the United States a dual language country like Canada or Belgium with all its attendant problems. But that is clearly the direction we are headed and it is wrongheaded to believe that those who get by in Spanish by pressing “two” on their touchtone phone will ever be anything but second-class citizens.

The plain and simple truth is that if you are not proficient in English you will probably wind up washing dishes no matter how long we have you sit in an American classroom. To use my personal example, when we moved to Paris, I sent my children, who didn’t speak a word of French, to a francophone school. They complained bitterly in September and October, but by some miracle were speaking French almost fluently by Christmas. Necessity, especially with young and fertile minds, is clearly the mother of language development.

This is no different from how my own mother, who was born only a few years after her parents arrived from Italy, learned English and became integrated into American society. And she was no different from the millions of German, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Korean etc. immigrants who, of necessity, learned English and gradually integrated into an educated American society. If we follow today’s model, the United States would become a Tower of Babel with the loss of the melting pot mentality that has served not only the nation, but also all our citizens so well. Children are a lot more flexible than we give them credit for — press them to read and write in English and their future prospects will improve tenfold. They will become educated, functioning members of society and not relegated to the status of second-class citizens performing menial tasks.

No presentation on education would be complete without addressing the role the teacher’s unions. I think the teacher’s unions do a wonderful job for the teachers and that is the way it should be, but they do not necessarily represent the best interests of our students. Politicians who vie for the union vote merely compound the problem. We need to alter the system so that the needs of the students come first, their seat should be at the head of the table. At the end of the day teachers are the employees and it is management’s responsibility to ensure that they perform their duties with the diligence and competency that our children deserve. Yes, at the risk of being politically incorrect, all teachers are not created equal, we should reward those who help our children to excel and fire those who do not make the appropriate contribution to our children’s education.

I will conclude by saying that if you aren’t sure if I support school choice and school vouchers you probably didn’t get to this last sentence.