Month: September 2017

Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’  future success.  Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement.  Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school?  There’s good reason to doubt that proposition.  Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling.   It’s equal-opportunity corruption.

I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.

Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns.  Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.

Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.

However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools.  Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown.  California is a hotbed for these conversations.  One site for Bay Area moms and dads,  berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12)  Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state.  For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools.  From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area  registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants).  After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed  its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s).  The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)

Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation.  The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.

Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA!  Look at the top and bottom of the chart below.  The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)

Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism.  A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society.  Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)

“Convenient servant base”?  Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me.  “Gated community”?  Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.

For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely.  But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education.  Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better.  The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier.  Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.

All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources.  You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school.  The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey.  The sameness is quite remarkable.

30 years worth of experience  as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.

Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.

Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics.  Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared.  Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft.  Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system.  Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role  of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history.  Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly.  The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left.  I could go on.

For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey.  Who’s John Dewey?  He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.

He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”.  The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism.  “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization.  The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders.  The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.

On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner.  Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it.  The whole thing is a levelling of all students.  From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core.  It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.

About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords.  Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed.  What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future?  Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.

Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences.  AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense.  AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections.  They demand mature judgments from immature minds.  Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry.  It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties.  Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.

The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits.  Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric.  The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.

Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard.  Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.

We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.

We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction.  It has penetrated nearly everywhere.  Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus.  Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic.  A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity.  Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.

Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career.  Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises.  We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers.  Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

1. Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker,  7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
2. An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel,  5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
3. Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014,   http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
4. Excellent maps showing  a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”,   http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
5. “White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015,  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
6. “Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour,  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
7. A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University,  http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
8. For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council,  http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
9. A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017,  http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
10. Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
    MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008,   https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF.  ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
11. ** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012,  https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
12. Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
13. “II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009,  http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
14. “5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017,  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
15. “California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute,  https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states