Today I came across the book Disrupting Class by Christensen et al. The book is essentially a business person's take on how the American education system fails our kids. It was interesting to read the parts where the authors sketched out the history of American education and how schools have morphed over time to offer a wide variety of subjects geared to prep students for college or a manual vocation. I think this history rings true, and I agree with the book that schools have come to provide a lot of social services too, like free breakfast and lunch programs.
I disagree with the book that schools have become cookie cutters that don't offer individualized education. Particularly at the elementary school level, teachers have to provide a classroom environment where a large percentage of their students (from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds) are stimulated. I don't envy elementary school teachers their jobs; teach high school math and you are pretty much teaching the same curriculuum to the kids, and your classes are segregated by grade and the ability of the kids...making your daily lesson plan thus isn't too hard. In contrast, an elementary school teacher has to develop a lesson plan that stimulates and engages kids with a wide variety of ability levels in disparate subjects such as math, english, social studies, science, and the arts. With one notable exception, I have been in awe of my eldest daughter's elementary school teachers. The notable exception was her fourth grade teacher, who was clearly just stamping her time clock...no amount of specially scheduled meetings with her (and ultimately, her and the principal) inspired her to do educationally oriented stuff like, for instance, assign homework to our kid. Our daughter didn't learn anything in fourth grade that she didn't know before. However, statistically speaking, on average one out of seven of your child's teachers will be in the lowest 1/7 of the teaching pool, so I am happy that all her other teachers were excellent.
It seems to be universally accepted that our schools appear to be failing our kids. From the statistical studies I've done of NCLB data, however, the failure is not really in our schools (at the elementary level at least), but in our society; school reading scores at the third grade are almost 100% correlated to the fraction of kids from low-income families in the school. This is stunning...I can tell you that such strong correlations are almost never seen in real world data. This strong correlation has not been lost on educators and politicians. It is why we have free breakfast and lunch programs.
But all the free breakfasts and lunches in the world cannot address the grinding hopelessness of these kids' home lives. The average kid from a low income family comes from a family of 4 making less than $21,000 a year, headed by a single parent (usually a mother). On average, the parent works full time. In our particular school district, low-income families move on average three to four times a year. That's on average. I learned this when I met with the local school superintendent when I offered to donate my services for free as a statistical consultant to the school district. The reason the families move so often is that they live in rental housing...they save up enough money to pay the deposit and the first month's rent, then end up defaulting on their rent by the second or third month. Then they get evicted, and go live with family for a period while they scrape together the money to start the process over again. I have in fact seen exactly this cycle in action in the family lives of school friends of my eldest daughter.
Such a heartbreaking vicious cycle. No wonder academics are not high on the priorities of these families when life is such a brutal struggle just to get by. They are of course proud of their kids when they do well academically, but if their child is not doing well, it isn't like they have extra money for tutoring, and it isn't like the single parents have the energy or wherewithall to tutor their kids after working full time and having the needs of three kids to take care of.
So, I don't think our elementary schools can be "fixed" by some slick business person who decides to "analyze" the problem and point out perceived flaws. What needs to be fixed is the society that has people who work full time making less than $21,000 a year. I have no idea how one person could live on that, let alone support three kids to boot. In addition, American society offers very little in the way of federal funding to ensure that all school children in the country get equal per-capita school funding; unlike the Canadian system, where federal funds kick in to equalize things, the American system relies overwhelmingly on local funding to support the schools. Schools in low-income areas are thus stunningly under-funded.
The problem with the high schools is almost separate, because the kids have pretty much either sunk or swum academically by the time they get there. For the kids who have swum, the American high school system for the most part fails to adequately prepare them with requisite math skills that would give them the choice of going on to a successful STEM career. I don't know about other subjects, but from a science and technology standpoint, American high schools fail compared to the high school mathematics curriculuum of other countries, such as China, India, Canada, etc. And I'm not talking just about the curriculuum for science-oriented kids...I'm talking about the math curriculuum for all the kids.
