An education primer for parents, Part I: you have some homework to do

The sad fact is that for many of today’s parents, the public school is simply a great place to drop the kids off to play every day so the parents can pursue their own lives.

They have no clue what is going on in the classroom, nor do they wish to find out. As long as that building can keep the little monsters out of their hair for a few hours of peace and quiet, everything’s cool.

That’s a sad statement about our society, but ask an educator: if they’re honest with you, they’ll attest to the veracity of the statement.

Far too many of today’s parents feel that getting their kids to school on time every day and making sure homework gets done means they’ve done their duty. They fail to recognize the importance of full parental involvement, and both do a disservice to their kids and fail to hold the education system accountable.

Hence, I hereby offer the first part of Dave’s Education Primer for Parents. I’ll warn you in advance: it’s lengthy and dry reading, but if you care about your kids, you need to know.

I’ll be honest with y’all: I don’t have kids, to the best of my knowledge. I wanted to do the whole picket-fence-and-family thing, but life’s developments led me elsewhere.

I have tried to make up for that by adopting parents as my special project in life and trying to teach them the importance of being a big part of their kids’ education.

Being a parent in today’s world is NOT easy. I do not envy them the job.

There are a lot of parents who get active in education by becoming volunteers in the schools, by becoming PTA members, or even by becoming school board members. I won’t minimize the important role those activities play in ensuring your kid values learning.

But being “involved” in your child’s education means a whole lot more these days. In a roundabout way, you almost need to attend school with them to make sure that what’s being put into their brains is what you want to be put there.

First of all, let’s dispel one notion that many parents I’ve talked to seem to have. The people who run our schools are NOT smarter than you. They’re educated, they’re well-drilled, but they’re not necessarily smarter.

A lot of the college kids who set their sights on teaching degrees do so because education degrees are a lot easier to earn than, say, math degrees. Some 70 percent of those attending our colleges of education in this country were themselves “C” students when they were in public schools.

Educators sound smart, because they use a lot of words the rest of us rarely do. I call this offshoot of English “educationese,” and for someone unfamiliar with the lingo, it can be intimidating. Today’s education professionals are steeped in terminology which contains lots of multi-syllable words—some of them necessary, some of them Politically Correct, some of them simply to deflect criticism.

I can take a platoon of Marines fresh out of boot camp and spend two hours drilling with them, and I can guarantee that if you pop in to interview them you will leave wondering how in the world such highly-educated youngsters wound up in the Marines instead of some master’s program in college.

To understand why it is important for you to be involved in your child’s education these days, you have to understand what they are being taught. It’s helpful to know the science—social science—which underlies modern education.

The average parent does not spend a lot of time researching the roots of modern teaching methodology. If they did, they’d be scared to death and we’d see a lot more home-schooling.

Modern education methodology—that means “how to teach”—is based on two primary concepts these days. First is the theory of “progressive education” introduced by John Dewey in the 1930s, second is a fusion of the theories of psychologists Benjamin Bloom and B.F. Skinner.

Dewey introduced the idea of “real-world learning.” His idea was that if kids liked going to school and learned things they could reasonably expect to use later in life, they’d learn more. He set aside the notion that skills and drills were important, even though those skills and drills made the United States the most literate country in the world and the world’s technological leader.

There are some who credit the adoption of Dewey’s ideas for allowing the U.S. to find itself behind the Soviet Union in the space race in the late 1950s and early 1960s—and the re-imposition of skills and drills for a short time in the early 1960s for the re-emergence of a properly-educated class of scientists late in the 1960s which put the U.S. back into the lead.

Bloom and Skinner were behaviorists, not educators. Bloom developed the Taxonomy of Learning, an idea that one builds learning by levels, and that by establishing a plan for expected outcomes, we can control educational progress.

His theories led to the development of educational “outcomes,” and to what came to be known as “Outcome-Based Education,” which is today known as “standards.”

Skinner theorized that all human behavior is controlled by the actions of others, and that social scientists are best suited to exercise that control by controlling the education of the populace.

The ideas of Dewey, combined with those of Bloom and Skinner, were adopted fully in public education in the late 1960s following the creation of the U.S. Department of Education.

When first introduced as “Mastery Learning,” schools around the country raced to adopt the program. It failed miserably. College-entrance scores plummeted, honor graduates found themselves having to take remedial math and English courses, and outraged parents demanded change.

The change was a change of terminology. Mastery Learning became Outcome-Based Education (OBE).

It, too, failed miserably. Marketed successfully by slick advertising gurus like William Spady, the system was rapidly implemented in school district after school district around the country with its “new” ideas like open classrooms, student-directed learning, etc.

One student in the Old Saybrook, Ore., school system—described by her teachers as “one of the brightest math students ever to graduate from this school”—flunked out of Brown University in her first week because she couldn’t do simple math.

When OBE became a magnet for criticism after its failures were exposed by some brilliant journalists like Robert Holland of Richmond, Va., the marketers simply took a step back, re-named their product and charged back in to make more money by offering a “new and improved” learning program. Outcome-Based Education became “New Standards,” and later simply “Standards.”

The newer version of Mastery Learning was marketed by a new group called the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) headed by a chap named Marc Tucker. They heard the parental call for a system which prepared kids for “the real world,” and in particular realized the value of having major corporations buy in to the system.

The corporations, eager to reap a little PR and quite happy to see someone who was offering to train entry-level workers for them, were all too happy to help. The emphasis on “accountability” via “high-stakes testing” answered critique from politicians and the mainstream news media, and Standards became the new unassailable methodology of education in America.

Tucker partered with a popular governor and his wife to implement the system in Arkansas, and that state promptly sank to the bottom in student performance nationwide. When that governor was elected president in 1992, Tucker wrote to the governor’s wife, Hillary Clinton, that it was time to implement his system nationwide, and turn children into “human resources of the state.”

Then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards picked up the program and began its implementation in our state, and when George W. Bush swept into office, he finished it—even after initially calling it “touchy-feely mush.”

You may now recognize mastery learning/outcome-based education/new standards as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), and its high-stakes testing element as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). Texas now boasts a dropout rate of 25 percent.

When Bush took his circus nationwide as the new President, he carried the program with him in the form of “No Child Left Behind”—a bit of legislation often now referred to by pundits as “No Administrator Left Behind” because of its massive increase in the education bureaucracy.

Next in this series: How our paradigm of education has changed.