Did the Public Schools Kill Mickey Mouse?

IF YOU WORK in the public schools you’ve heard these lines a thousand times. America’s schools are failing. We’re not preparing kids to compete in a global economy.

The nation’s young are doomed.

Well—doomed if we don’t jam Common Core down their throats—doomed if we don’t get Teach for America “game-changers” into classrooms across the land—and doomed, doomed, doomed, if we don’t let Big Corporations break the public school monopoly and start schools and run them according to healthy business principles. That is: piling up profits for Big Corporations.

I’m increasingly having my doubts. According to multiple sources the U.S. economy is not on the verge of collapse. Housing starts last year were the highest since 2007. The stock market is up 10,000 points since March 9, 2009, when it bottomed out. Car sales set a record for numbers, 17.5 million units sold, and value, $570 billion worth of new wheels, in 2015. Almost 300,000 jobs were added in December. 

According to Forbes the numbers were good all year:

The numbers were also impressive in 2014. According to CNN 2.95 million jobs were added, the best figure since 1999.

Of course, we’ve also been told repeatedly that teachers in Finland are doing a stupendous job—whereas our teachers are chopped reindeer liver! Finnish schools are amazing! Everyone graduates! Some kids graduate twice!! Boy, oh, boy, everyone in Finland is prepared to compete in a global economy.

That’s why Finnish unemployment stood at 9.4 % in November 2015, almost double the U.S. rate.

THE BIGGEST, BADDEST school reformers keep insisting we must prepare students to compete in a global economy. But what if problems facing U.S. workers today—stagnant wages, declining benefits, lost pensions—have nothing to do with the system of education? Let’s consider scores for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2012, the last year available.

Sure. Finland looked good:

True…the United States was mired in the middle of the pack:

But look at Mexico! Mexican teachers weren’t exactly tearing it up when it came to preparing kids to compete in a global economy. They finished 53^rd in mathematics, 55^th in science, and 52^nd in reading.

Yet none of it mattered. The Mexican unemployment rate at the end of 2015 was just under four percent. That means Mexico was doing better than a number of countries scoring in the top ten on PISA tests, including The Netherlands, 6.6%, Canada, 7.1%, Ireland, 8.8%, and Poland, 9.8%.

And Finland, too.

WE KNOW JOBS in the U.S. auto industry rebounded between 2009 and 2013, from 560,000 to 690,000, a 23% bump. But the educational preparation of students had little to do with the jump. Jobs in Mexican auto plants soared during those years, from 368,000 to 589,000, a gain of 60%. We know, too, since 2009, that U.S. wages in the auto sector have fallen by 12.7%. It doesn’t take a renowned economist to explain that teachers are blameless in all of this. Jobs in the auto industry drained from the U.S., not because our students aren’t prepared to compete and Mexican students are. It boils down to manufacturing costs in the U.S. (wages plus benefits) which averaged $35.67 per hour in 2013. Companies could send jobs to Mexico and spend $6.36.

The idea that bad U.S. schools are to blame for current economic woes is absurd on its face and harmful in effect. Do we really believe, for example, that it’s going to turn out great if we let Big Corporations sink their greedy claws into the schools? To put it plainly, the people who run the Big Corporations are the people we should be worried about. From steel to electronics to women’s underwear, the story is the same, of jobs lost, sent overseas.

In 1992 U. S. textile and apparel industries employed 1.8 million workers in the USA. Fourteen years later 576,000 jobs remained. Were teachers in Bangladesh, where many of those jobs ended up, doing really great? In 2013 workers in the textile and apparel industries there saw a whopping 77 % increase in wages and benefits. It had to be the schools! And the teachers! And maybe it had to do with the fact that, even with that raise, workers in Bangladesh were earning an average of $67.40 per month.

In the end, if we want to help America’s next generation we can start by focusing on the hypocrisy underlying the blame-the-schools game. We can expose the lies. We need to point the finger in a proper direction and elect men and women who want to protect the American middle class.

It might even help if we stopped buying goods and services from Big Corporations that keep outsourcing jobs.

ACCORDING TO THE Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 and 2013, 3.2 million American jobs were eliminated or displaced as a result of a trade imbalance with China. Who then, we should ask, loves producing in and/or buying Chinese-made products and selling them to us? Who loves doing business in China even if the Chinese government arrests a hundred human rights lawyers in a single weekend? Who loves sucking up to communist officials, building “good business relationships,” even when those officials kidnap publishers who criticize corrupt communist rule? And which Big Corporations are only too happy to turn a blind eye, if profits are high, when China’s chief of naval operations warns the U.S. is in danger of touching off a war with “provocative acts” in the South China Sea?

Who loves doing business with China? Walmart does. Loews Hardware does. Apple does, too.

The Big Corporations cry in their beer over all the “lousy” graduates our schools send their way. “Oh, we do wish we could hire more of them!” they wail. “But, they’re just not well-enough prepared.”

Also: they want to earn more than $67.40 per month.

So let’s turn our attention, finally, to the Magic Kingdom and see how this line of hooey almost always plays out. Last fall, Disney Corporation cooked up an elaborate cost-cutting scheme. Disney would hire an outsourcing firm in India to send 250 workers to Florida, all on temporary visas. Once here they would be trained by their American counterparts, the very workers the U.S. public schools supposedly cannot produce. Disney would get rid of the American workers, send the Indians home, and let them work from a call center overseas. “I just couldn’t believe they would fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs,” said one newly-unemployed American worker. 

YET THEY DID. And if some Big Corporate type can ever figure out how to outsource Mickey’s job, good old Mickey will be out on his ear.

Don’t let yourself be fooled by those who keep trying to pin the blame for economic woes on America’s public schools. 

Sorry, Mickey, we're outsourcing your job!

Do Schools Fail or Do Homes Fail?

As a veteran teacher (now retired), I’ve long been interested in the role parents play in American education.

I spent 33 years in a classroom. 

So I understand that teachers matter.

What bothers me, particularly in recent years, is the laser-like focus in school reform on those who stand at the front of every class. Our “leaders” in education, various and sundry fools like Arne Duncan, insist that the key to improvement is holding teachers accountable for everything, even inclement weather. These leaders claim that we nust now measure everything teachers do, from respiration to defecation, to raise academic standards. They believe if we create enough charter schools and hand out enough vouchers then critical problems in education will magically fade away.

Call me a skeptic.

I was flipping through the pages of my personal diary last week when I came across a brief mention (in the fall of 1980) of a young New Jersey couple who offered to trade in their 14-month-old son for a used Corvette.

The dealer wanted $8,800 but…hey…these lousy parents had an extra child they didn’t want. How about a swamp: flesh for metal?

I don’t think in this young boy’s life that teachers were going to be the problem. 

In 1998, after spending an evening calling parents at home to inform them their sons or daughters were behind on their work in my class, I again jotted down a few thoughts in my diary (only the names have been changed below):

Spent 1 ½ hours on phone tonight with five parents. Bill Hawley’s mom has him in AA three nights a week and says he’s rated chemically dependent. (Carol [his sister] is also in the program on a limited basis.) Bill’s dad started him drinking at six—Bill got into his father’s cocaine.

Sure. Teachers matter. But parents play a fundamental role in education—shaping their children from the moment they’re born.

In my experience, most parents did a good job—just as did most teachers. But where children were badly warped by life in the home my colleagues and I could only mitigate the harm already inflicted.

My wife (also a retired educator) and I were watching an old CNN documentary about education recently, narrated by Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock, you might not remember, first became famous when he tried to live on McDonald’s food for a month. So his take on education was interesting. First, he visited a school in Finland—because Finland is now supposed to be a leader in education. (I think that’s a bit of a myth; but leave that issue aside.) Spurlock was trying to be fair and even did a little teaching, admitting later it was much harder than expected. Then he returned to visit Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, a successful charter operation in Brooklyn.

I know there are good charter schools out there and based on Spurlock’s story, I think most of us would be happy to send our children to Williamsburg. I visited Discovery Academy in March, myself. This Toledo charter school is run by one of my former students, Mr. Noah Campbell. As expected his school was well-run and I came away impressed. I also talked to his faculty and again came away impressed. Most of his teachers we’re first-year educators but all were clearly serious about their crucial work with children. Good administrators and teachers always make schools better. But even dedicated individuals like those on staff at Discovery Academy can’t do everything.

Near the end of Spurlock’s documentary, he makes a bold and erroneous statement. He says every parent wants their child to succeed in school. 

That’s not true. 

Or: in too many cases, it’s only true to this degree sense. All of us who want to lose weight care about losing weight. We just don’t care enough to take real action.

The grim truth is that not all parents are equal—and truly bad parents cripple their children in ways educators find incredibly difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to overcome. All too often this crippling effect begins in the womb, with one in ten American mothers abusing drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. You can’t cure that kind of problem by grading schools as many of our school reform “leaders” insist.

You might as well grade hospitals.

To say all parents really care is absurd. Suppose your dad is Travis Henry, former NFL running back with the Denver Broncos. Dad has trouble finding time to help with your homework because…well…Dad has nine children by nine different women. Dad would like to pay child support, too, but Dad can’t do it, despite millions of dollars earned during his career, because he’s been busted several times for drug possession and finally for cocaine trafficking.

Bad parents come in all colors and can be seen at the top of the economic heap just as often as at the bottom. I taught in an affluent suburban district near Cincinnati and almost all my students were white and from well-to-do families. That didn’t stop one father from repeatedly molesting his seventh grade daughter—and stalling off teachers when we began to home in on root causes of the girl’s depression. I called that son-of-bitch several times and invited him in twice for meetings and he always assured us his daughter was happy at home. She just didn’t like school.

Every teacher comes to understand what Spurlock and all the reformers miss—that every imaginable type of human being can become a parent. You don’t even need to be sane to produce sperm or egg. Remember Ariel Castro, the sociopath who chained up three women in the basement of his home for more than a decade? He had a daughter by one of his victims.

Who in their right mind would argue that the biggest problems a child like that would face in life would be the quality of her elementary teachers?

How about Fred Phelps, who died this April? Phelps headed the Westboro Baptist Church, a hateful religious operation famous for picketing the funerals of American service people.. According to Time magazine one of his sons claimed dad kept all his offspring in line with fists and a club. Nate Phelps spoke of a life “filled with anger, fear and violence.” On one occasion his father used the handle of a mattock to beat his children into good behavior.

If all parents wanted their children to succeed in school or even lead a decent existence stories like that of Megan Huntsman wouldn’t make lurid headlines. The bodies of seven dead newborns, apparently born to Huntsman over the last decade, were found swaddled in rags in cardboard boxes in her garage. Where was her former husband, father of the couple’s three surviving daughters? Oh yes. In 2005 he was sentenced to nine years in prison on drug charges.

You can look at the problem on a case-by-case basis or consider it societally. It’s simple true. Not all parents are equal. Not even close. In 2013 it was reported that 2.7 million U. S. children had one or both parents locked up behind bars.

Most teachers I’ve ever met care deeply about helping every child—but when they can’t save them all, blaming them only makes their job, already hard, much harder. And it does nothing to help the children who most need help. I’m retired. Technically, I don’t have to worry. But if we really cared about every child we’d do far more to help every child. 

Think all parents care? Don’t be so naive. In 2009, for example, CBS reported that one fourth of all mothers and fathers who owed child support paid nothing. Zip. If we’re going to grade schools, as many of our reformers say we must, what do these deadbeat parents earn for a grade?

A ZERO in the gradebook seems appropriate.

In fact, even our greatest school reformers haven’t been able to fix broken families. Arne Duncan couldn’t fix the problem of youths in gangs in the Chicago Public Schools. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had three terms in office to improve schools in New York City? That didn’t help the rising tide of homeless children—22,000 of them. And remember Michelle Rhee? The Broom Queen was going to fix the Washington, D. C. public schools by sweeping out all the bad teachers. According to an article in the Washington Post last week it turns out teachers weren’t the biggest problem where thousands of D. C. students were concerned. Nout unless we’re going to fault teachers for lack of telepathic powers.

Even after all of Rhee’s sweeping, it turns out that one in five D. C. children piled up at least twenty days of unexcused absences last year; and that doesn’t factor in any excused absences. To put it simply: 20% of parents in D. C. allowed children to miss school 20% of the time. Even grading such moms and dads on a curve, they’d earn no better than a D- for ineffective parenting.

I have a good friend, a conservative fan of Fox News, and if you ask him he believes most public school teachers spend their days having sex with children and running to union representatives for protection. We know, of course, that scum bags do occasionally find employment in the classroom—and the faster we get rid of them the better. But one teacher having sex with a student garners more attention than 10,000 parents sexually abusing their children. There are, after all, an estimated three millions cases of child abuse and neglect in this country annually, involving six million children.

On average, four or five youngsters die every twenty-four hours.

Every good teacher and every good administrator I’ve ever known could have told you pretty much the same. These people devote their lives to trying to help the kinds of students who badly need help in school because they get no help (and often harm) at home. But our leaders continue to miss this dilemma. They talk about education as if only teachers factor into results. How would they help a homeless child and that homeless child’s teacher? Grade the school if the child can’t read at grade level. What about that seventh grader who was being molested by her father? How do our leaders help me, if I’m still teaching, help this poor young woman? 

Oh, hell, here’s their bold idea; Let’s have the girl take more and more and more standardized tests.

I’m retired. Maybe I’m just old and crotchety. But, if you ask me, I don’t believe our education “leaders” have any clue what they’re doing.



POSTSCRIPT:  Let me note very clearly that I am not bashing parents. Most of the parents I dealt with over the years were doing a fine job, just as I did with my children, just as most parents across the nation do every day.

In my experience, however, the kids who most needed saving usually came from homes where parents had failed badly. If we want to save ALL children we need to focus on that reality and do more to help teachers.

U. S. Education by the Numbers

The year now coming to an end has been good for education reformers.  That doesn't mean it has been a good for education, necessarly; but reformers have had a field day, blaming teachers and teachers' unions for almost every problem in the schools. 

In 2011 we were warned that America's educational decline undermined our standing in a global economy.  We heard that charter schools and vouchers would save U. S. education.  Arne Duncan, U. S. Secretary of Education, pushed the idea that standardized testing was the key.  Michelle Rhee, the Queen of Hearts in reforming circles, insisted that all school improvement boiled down to better teachers in the classrooms.  Steven Brill--a lawyer, by trade--wrote a book, laying out the same essential case.  And Davis Guggenheim's savaged teachers as lazy, incompetent union bums in the movie Waiting for Superman.

Meanwhile, I continued to amuse myself, trying to write a book about teaching.  Naturally, I am making myself the handsome hero of the story.  When Hollywood buys the rights, I even know who I want to play me in the film version:  Brad Pitt. 

(I think we look like twins.)

At any rate, here are some education statistics you might have missed recently:

0:  We know U. S. schools are killing our nation's standing in the global economy, right?  This number represents the growth in the Japanese economy since 1991 (it was $5.7 trillion two decades ago and it's $5.7 trillion now), despite a "superior" education system.  In a survey done in 2009, comparing fifteen-year olds from 65 countries, Japanese students ranked #5 in reading, #4 in math, and #2 in science.

1:  Number of unions representing teachers in the Wyoming City Public Schools, here in Ohio, where graduation rates are 98% and 2% of children qualify for the federal free lunch program.  Same number representing teachers in Cincinnati Public Schools (bordering the Wyoming schools) where graduation rates are 81.9% and roughtly 60% of students qualify for the same program.

1.8:  Estimated % growth of U. S. economy in 2011; critics say it's the public schools' fault.  (U. S. public school teachers are apparently a bunch of miscreants.) 

4.4:  In 2009, Finland ranked #2 in that same survey of fifteen-year olds in reading, #2 in math and #1 in science. Finland is also a socialist country and only 4.4% of children grow up in poverty. In the United States, the comparable figure is 22%. 
5:42:  Hours and minutes spent daily watching TV or playing video games, average child in the U. S., age 8-18, compared to 38 minutes with printed material.  (See:  U. S. test scores below.)

6:  Number of years actually spent in the classroom by leading voices in education reform, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, Joel I. Klein and Catherine Black, two recent chancellors of the New York City schools, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad, billionaire philanthropists, Jon Schnur, who runs the school-reform group New Leaders for New Schools, Brill, Rhee, who promised to save the Washington, D. C. schools, Guggenheim, Chester Flynn Jr., think tank expert and staunch advocate of No Child Left Behind, Duncan, and six other U. S. secretaries of education, combined.  That's right:  combined.

8:  Percentage growth of Brazilian economy in 2010.  Brazil ranks 52nd in reading, 57th in math and 53rd in science out of 65 nations.

10:  Percentage of babies born in Scioto County, Ohio, with illegal drugs in their blood.  (You can see where this might be hard to pin on teachers.)

12:  U. S. ranking in survey of 65 nations in reading (three-way tie with Iceland and Poland).

14+:  Hours the average student in South Korea spends per day in school, doing homework, and in special after-hours tutoring sessions. In 2009, South Korea ranked #1 in the international survey noted above in reading, #1 in math and #3 in science.

15:  One out of every fifteen U. S. high school students admits smoking marijuana on a nearly daily basis in 2011.

17: U. S. ranking in science knowledge, for fifteen-year-olds, out of 65 nations.

25:  U. S. ranking in math, above.

33:  U. S. standing, out of 33 "advanced economies," in a survey by the International Monetary Fund, in a ranking of preterm births and infant mortality.

36:  Dollars per month, average pay for garment workers in Bangladesh, where exports have doubled since 2004.  (You figure a superior system of education has nothing to do with this trend.)

43:  Number of points higher--average SAT math scores--of Asian American students, who attend the same "failing schools" as white, black and Hispanic students.

46:  Percentage of American adults who admit they did not read a single book last year not required for school or work.  (See U. S. reading scores above.)

96:  Number of reporters who showed up in 2009, to watch Tom Brady's first practice after missing most of the preceding NFL season with a serious knee injury.  (You couldn't get 96 reporters to show up to watch the best teacher in America work in the next 96 years.  We don't exactly focus on education in this country.  See Japan and South Korea, above.)

108:  Number of major league baseball players taking prescribed medications for A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. in 2008,  after Major League Baseball began testing for amphetamines.  (It makes you wonder if doctors might not be over-doing.)  More generally, the Mayo Clinic estimates that 7.5% of all U. S. students are now taking Ritalin for A.D.D. and A.D.H.D.

200:  Estimated murders of children in the U. S. by their parents every year.  (Not all parents are the same and it's hard to see how vouchers will solve every "school" problem.)

240:  Days spent per year in school by the average Japanese student.  If U. S. students score lower than the Japanese it may be due in part to the fact that the Japanese boy or girl attends as many days in 3 years as his or her American peer does in 4.

245:  Chicago public school students killed or wounded, mostly as a result of gang violence, during the 2009-2010 school year, almost entirely outside of schools and off school grounds.  (This is the district Arne Duncan "fixed," by the way.) 

670:  Length in pages of the No Child Left Behind Law, designed to close the achievement gap between races, (see Asian American students, above) and passed by Congress in 2002, requiring schools to insure that every child is proficient in reading and math by 2014.  This gap is entirely the fault of schools, even though black males are six times more likely to be murdered than white males, blacks have an unemployment rate twice as high as whites, a life-expectancy four years shorter, and are three times more likely to raise their children in single-parent homes.

8,500:  child abuse and neglect cases in one year in Hamilton County, Ohio.  Call Children's Services in your area for comparable statistics.  (See:  vouchers and charter schools, above.)

17,000:  School resource officers presently employed in U. S. schools (a euphemism for "police" in halls). 

132,000:  Students now in U. S. public schools, classified as "severely disabled" .  (See:  No Child Left Behind, above.)  This represents only a small fraction of the 6.5 million students on special education plans in the public schools.

954,914:  Homeless children in America, according to most recent statistics by the U. S.  Department of Education.  (Charter schools?  Really?  That's your answer?)

1,500,000:  U. S. students, grades K-12, with at least one parent behind bars at any given moment.

5,000,000:  yearly salary of Ronald J. Packard, chief executive of K12 Inc., the biggest for-profit company in on-line education.  Packard's schools are almost entirely funded by taxpayer money, based on number of students enrolled. 

26,500,000:  Money spent by K12 Inc. in 2010 on advertising; i. e. spending taxpayer money to convince students to sign up for internet classes, funded by taxpayer money.  (Repeat cycle until taxpayers get too dizzy.)

31,650,000:  Value in dollars, added incentives not included, of 8-year contract signed by John Calipari in 2009 to coach the University of Kentucky men's basketball team.  Ironically, schools where Calipari coached previously were twice forced to forfeit games due to NCAA rules violations.  Memphis forfeited its entire 2007-08 season (38 wins) after investigators discovered that at least one star player, reportedly guard Derrick Rose, and probably two, had other students take the SAT tests for them.

Could it be that we have a social problem in this country, not really a school problem?

As I. F. Stone once noted, "There are countries in which the ignorant have respect for learning.  This is not one of them."

How About Better Parents?

If you missed it, an editorial in the New York Times yesterday, by Thomas L. Friedman, "uncovered" an ugly truth.  Apparently, parents matter when it comes to education!

As Homer Simpson likes to say, "D'oh!"

If you've been reading my blog you know my intent, in part, is to defend good teachers--by far the majority.  Still, I admit:  I've seen some bad ones.  I once worked with an educator who was so unmotivated, you wondered:  If he died at his desk, would students notice the difference between rigor mortis and his normal level of "activity?"  Or would decomposition have to set in?

Yes.  Let's get rid of bad teachers.  In fact, let's say you could get rid of them all today. 

You'd still have the same Continental Divide in education.  You can't make the Rocky Mountains disappear, no matter how hard you flog America's public school teachers.  You can take away their tenure, if you like, and have all the vouchers and charter schools you want.  But you still have good parents and you still have bad ones----and more than a few terrible ones--and therein lies the problem which NONE of our education experts ever address.  Michelle Rhee?  She says it's all teachers.  Arne Duncan?  Same.  Joel I. Klein in New York City?  Yep:  teachers.  Davis Guggenheim in his movie, Waiting for Superman?  In his celluloid world only good parents and grandparents exist. 

So, sure, the problem must be crappy teachers. 


Who'd have imagined?
Parents who read to children at home
or make sure they have books
have children who score higher on
PISA tests.

Friedman, however, cites evidence to prove that--yes--the world is round.  A just-released study by the Program for International Student Assesssment finds that even accounting for variables like race and economic status, children of parents who read to them regularly when they are young, who ask questions about what school was like every day, who check on homework and talk up the idea of getting into college score significantly higher on the PISA tests.

As Friedman notes, in recent years "we've been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers' unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore's on the big international tests....But here's what some new studies are showing:  We need better parents.  Parents more focused on their children's education can also make a huge difference in a student's achievement."

Again, we all know good teachers matter.  Still, the evidence has been there all along--and I've been thinking about this issue since 1981, at least, when President Reagan and his advisors first started talking about vouchers and how they would cure all the problems in U. S. education.

In fact, for those who believe vouchers and charter schools are the answer, here's an old bedtime story from that era and you can read it to your children, which will help then when they go to school:

Once upon a time, when the argument for vouchers was new (January 1981) there lived a family in Augusta, Maine. There was no evil stepmother in this story. No mom, either. The father, Willard Radley, was no handsome prince. Mr. Radley had four sons. His problem was not that he required vouchers. His problem was that he produced sperm. 

The boys’ problem wasn’t that they needed vouchers, either. Their problem was that Willard was their dad. 

An investigation began in April 1980, after Ernest Radley, 7, was struck and killed by a car. Ernest’s brothers, ages 5 to 9, laid out a shocking tale for police. Mr. Radley had “induced his children to commit a variety of acts that would allow him to collect insurance money.” 

To be specific:  he ordered them to run into streets and take hits so he could take the profits.

In the real world there are no fairy-tale godmothers and vouchers are not magic wands.  Thirty years later, the argument for vouchers still founders on the same rock.

TOMORROW WE LOOK AT BAD PARENTS IN RECENT NEWS AND ASK:  HOW DO WE HELP KIDS WHO ABSOLUTELY NEED HELP THE MOST?

DO I HEAR:  PARENTAL VOUCHERS, ANYONE????