Set aside for now the twenty percent of students who make it into honors tracks or the equivalent who are fairly well-served. Put aside legions of dedicated and talented teachers who make the most of their situations, who do all they can for their students. Most students leave school, after thirteen or more years, knowing little, having little interest in reading, unable to write. Why?

This is not an essay about surface phenomena: reading and math wars, distorted textbooks, oversized schools, etc. This essay is about deep structural factors:

1) anti-academic schools of education
2) limited academic talent of too many educators
3) political power of the education establishment
4) political weakness of families/parents

1) ORIGIN OF SCHOOLS OF EDUCATION: The catalog of follies besetting American K-12 education have anti-academic origins: New York University education historian Diane Ravitch:

Teachers College, the premier pedagogical institution in the nation, began as an alternative to the academic tradition. It traced its origins to the Kitchen Garden Association, incorporated in 1880 to teach ' the domestic industrial arts among the laboring classes,' that is, to train young girls to work in domestic service as cooks and housemaids. Four years later, hoping to attract boys as students, the institution changed its name to the Industrial Education Association and added classes in carpentry and manual training to its curriculum of sewing, cooking, drawing and domestic service . . .

In 1887 . . . the institution decided to specialize in teacher training. It was once again rechristened, this time the New York College for the Training of Teachers, and began offering courses in the history of education, pedagogy, industrial arts . . . In 1889, a final name change produced Teachers College, which in 1893 became the pedagogy department of Columbia University. ( Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms , pp. 52-53)

From Kitchen Garden Association (1880) to Industrial Training Institute (1884) to College for the Training of Teachers (1887) to Teachers College (1889) in just nine years! How far, one might ask, does today ' s college of education apple fall from that training-service-for-cooks-and-house-maids tree ?

An education professor walked around the halls of his college campus and shot pictures of typical teacher ed displays made by college students training to become teachers. For years I've taught in college classrooms and had to look at similar displays. These wall displays would be typical for any college campus where teachers are trained . . . What's more, the displays would probably be the main basis of the semester's grade along with the 30-minute accompanying teaching by the student team who made it . . . If you've never experienced an inside view of a typical teacher education class, you must see this one (post on Education Consumers Clearinghouse message board, 12-0-05. Scroll horizontally to see the full displays) and this.

Cheri Pierson Yecke is Chancellor, K-12 Public Schools of Florida, and author of The War Against Excellence , a startling account of how colleges of education ' s anti-academic bias translates into classroom practice in middle schools.

2) LIMITED ACADEMIC APTITUDE OF MANY EDUCATORS (as compared to other students applying for graduate study, as measured by the Graduate Record Examination): In a nutshell, GRE scores of applicants for graduate study in education are on the left side of the " bell curve " distribution of scores. For example, applicants for graduate study in Education Administration - tested between July 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004 - had a combined mean total GRE score of 950 (Verbal - 427; Math - 523). That is sixth from the bottom of 51 fields of graduate study tabulated by the Educational Testing Service. The mean total GRE score across all fields was 1066. Which applicants had still lower total GRE scores than applicants in Education Administration ? Social Work - 896, Early Childhood - 913, Student Counseling - 928, Home Economics - 933, Special Education - 934 - education fields all. Other fields with mean GRE scores on the far left side of the GRE bell curve? Seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth from the left tip of the curve, respectively: Public Administration ( " practices and roles of public bureaucracies " ) - 965, Other Education - 968, Elementary Education - 970, Education Evaluation and Research - 985, Other Social Science - 993.

Note the pattern: Eighty plus percent on far-left-side-of-the-GRE-bell-curve are headed for - or, more likely, already employed by - public education systems. Ninety plus percent are headed for some form of government employment.

The picture is not unrelievedly bleak. There is a GRE outlier in the public education world: Secondary Education - 1063, in the middle of the GRE bell curve. That makes sense. Many secondary school teachers have academic degrees. Problems at the high school level may have less to do with teacher aptitude than with students ' K-8 preparation, with the regulatory/contractual straitjacket in which high schools operate, and with education administrators ' aptitude (mean GRE - 950), which likely contributes, for example, to school systems ' tolerance of out-of-field teaching:

Often, secondary school teachers are assigned to courses for which they lack certification or other appropriate preparation . . . [Richard] Ingersoll, who has done the most extensive examinations of this phenomenon, defines out-of-field teaching in terms of undergraduate major and minor . . . Using Ingersoll ' s definition, out-of-field teaching is most common in physical science (57 percent) and history (53 percent) [haven for coaches?] , followed by life sciences and mathematics (33 percent and 31 percent, respectively) . (Indicators 2000: Chapter Five: Elementary and Secondary Education, National Science Foundation)

To see mean GRE scores for all applicants tested between July 1, 2001 and June 30, 2004, scroll to pp 18-20 of the 2005-2006 Guide to the Use of Scores .

3) POLITICAL POWER OF THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT: Our public education systems - in their political essence - are employment programs, with the all political implications that function entails.

Let us grant that the academic advancement of children is of interest to politicians. We certainly know that the perception of the academic advancement is important to them. (See " Party Pooper: NAEP ' s Cold Water. " ) But politicians can never forget that their primary concern must be the school systems ' adults: teachers and administrators who fund election campaigns, staff phone banks and who vote to keep them in office.

Likewise, the leadership of teacher unions wish the best for children - when they think of children, but children are not the major concern:

When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children. (Albert Shanker, former president, American Federation of Teachers (1985), deceased)

How does the raw political power of teachers unions translate into routine personnel decisions?

Here's a D-Day type effort you rarely see newspapers put together for an education story. The Small Newspaper Group, publishers of a handful of small, Midwestern papers, filed some 1,500 public records requests with all of Illinois' public school districts to learn how often they attempted to fire a tenured teacher. The results: In the past 18 years, 93 percent of the state's districts have never even tried to fire a tenured teacher. Of the more than 95,000 tenured teachers in the state, an average of only two per year are fired for poor job performance . ( Education Intelligence Agency ' s December 5, 2005 Communique)

Reducing a tenured teacher ' s chances of being fired for incompetence in any given year to one in 47,000 is quite an achievement - for teachers unions. It is not an achievement for children. Seldom considered, it is also not in the interest of the dedicated majority of teachers. Because the system ' s powerful shield protecting deadwood and mediocrity produces abysmal results, good and bad teachers alike are subjected to mind-numbing micro-management from above in the form of canned everyone-on-page-182-on-Tuesday scripted lessons, high-stakes testing, and a slew of other mandates issued by education administrators of - do not forget - negligible academic ability.

Teacher autonomy and professional freedom? Those are quaint, impractical ideas, from the distant past.

4) POWERLESSNESS OF PARENTS/FAMILIES: Politicians secure the political support of teacher training institutions, educators of limited ability and their unions by making sure that students/families - unless they have the means or are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices - have no options. They cannot leave their assigned special interest-controlled, micro-managed school. They are captive clientele:

What must it be like for people who have raised their children until they're five years old, and suddenly, in this most important decision about their education, they have no say at all? They're stripped of their sovereignty over their child. And what must it be like for the child who finds that his parents don't have any power to help him out if he doesn't like the school? We are always complaining about the lack of responsibility in low-income families. But, the truth is, we have taken the authority away from them in this most important aspect of their child's life . . . If you are stripped of power - kept out of the decision-making loop - you are likely to experience degeneration of your own capacity to be effective, because you have nothing to do. If you don't have any responsibilities, you get flabby. And what we have are flabby families at the bottom end of the income scale. (John E. Coons, Berkeley Law Professor Emeritus, " School Choice as Family Policy, " School Reform News , February 1, 2005)

Coons, a pioneer supporter of school choice, believes we overlook the beneficial effects of empowering families/parents to act in their children ' s behalf:

There are a lot of benign effects of school choice but, for me, choice is family policy. It is one of the most important things we could possibly do as therapy for the institution of the family, for which we have no substitute. The relationship between the parent and child is very damaged if the parent loses all authority over the child for six hours a day, five days a week, and over the content that is put into the child's mind.

How far we have strayed from the vision of public education championed by this very early supporter:

If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council, the commissioners of the literary fund, or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Joseph C. Cabell, 1816: By " ward, " Jefferson meant a division of a county large enough to require "a log schoolhouse" and to "support a common teacher, instructing gratis the few unable to pay.")

Curious Correlations

I see interesting relationships. Students, teachers and administrators with low GRE scores are a natural fit with colleges of education. Each requires the other. Educators with low GRE scores and schools of education need all-powerful teachers unions - the former to protect their jobs, the latter to protect their exclusive franchise on the training of teachers and administrators. And where would any of the three - low GRE educators, schools of education, and teachers unions - be without powerless parents?

We have the perfect structure for ensuring academic mediocrity - and weak and irresponsible families. In the bargain, we get weakened neighborhoods and communities - due to resulting large, consolidated and often distant schools. (1)

End Note

1) State and federal governments weaken neighborhoods and communities in a number of ways. These are discussed in " Immigration and Schools, Part 4: Communities. "

Tom Shuford [email protected] is a retired teacher living in Lenoir, North Carolina.