The academic failure of the American public education system is a touchy topic.  It’s easy to take criticisms of the school system personally if you graduated from the system, have children in the system, or, especially, if you work within the system.

Let me be clear up-front that it is not my intent to insult graduates, students, parents, or teachers.  Nor do I blame teachers.  The problems we see are systemic ones, and teachers have little say in the structure of the system within which they operate.  They do a tough job, with increasingly less support.

Nevertheless, it is essential that we all, as citizens, take a good, hard look at the educational system we’re funding.  We need to acknowledge its shortcomings.  We need to be honest about what it does and doesn’t, can and cannot, do.  We need to stop pretending its one-size-fits-all approach is superior to other options, like homeschooling and “alternative schools.”  There is a widespread presumption that we “do school” the way we do because it produces a well-educated populace.  But is that what the evidence shows?

Academic Basics

Most of us would agree that the fundamentals of academic education are the so-called “3 R’s” — reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.  These, together with critical thinking/logic, also comprise the skills-based portion of academics.  What does that mean?

A subject is either skills-based or knowledge-based.  Skills-based subjects teach a set of skills (of course).  These are, at least in part, sequential.  You don’t, for instance, learn to read sentences until you can read words, and you don’t read words until you recognize letters.  Likewise, you don’t learn algebra before learning to count.  So, although there’s often some flexibility (does it really matter if a child learns the letter “c” before or after the letter “z”?), overall, these build on each other and can’t just be tackled in any random order.

Knowledge-based subjects are different.  Knowledge-based subjects are rooted almost entirely in the accumulation of knowledge on a given topic.  For the most part, it doesn’t matter what order this information comes in.  It doesn’t matter if you learn about biology before or after physics.  It doesn’t matter if you learn about the Industrial Revolution before or after the Civil War.  And so on.

Another important difference is that knowledge-based subjects are, to a large extent, developmentally independent.  If you read about the Industrial Revolution with a preschooler, he might not absorb the same depth of information on the topic as a middle schooler or a college student, but he already has the capacity to accumulate information.

This is not true of skills-based subjects.  All of the major academic skills require a certain developmental readiness.  If a child hasn’t reached the relevant stage of development yet, he will not be able to effectively learn the skill.  It’s similar to trying to teach a 3-month-old to walk.  Although there might be rare exceptions, the average 3-month-old is not developmentally ready to walk.

The net result of all these differences is that skills-based subjects are necessarily the foundation of an academic education.  Give the child the knowledge, and he has whatever knowledge you gave him — never anything more.  Give the child the skills — with or without any significant amount of knowledge — and he can use those skills to acquire for himself all the knowledge he wants or needs.

So… back to those 3 R’s…

(Il)literacy and the Public Education System

John Taylor Gatto, 2-time New York State Teacher of the Year, concluded that “it only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on.”  That’s less than two weeks of school.  (Elsewhere, he was quoted as saying 100.  Still only a few weeks’ worth of school.)  Given that literacy is also one of our most fundamental skill sets, we should expect that after more than 14,000 hours of schooling each, graduates of the public school system can, if nothing else, read well.  Right?  Wrong.

According to Department of Education figures from 2015 (as cited by author Chantal Jauvin), 19% of high school students graduate unable to read. Jauvin asks, “Do we have enough jobs to employ so many illiterate people? Will those jobs pay sufficiently to keep them out of poverty?”  But shouldn’t we be asking a more basic question: why?

Certainly there are, in some cases, extenuating circumstances.  But we are paying roughly $8000-12000 per year per student to fund a system which, given thirteen years, fails to teach almost a full one-fifth of students to read.  The government’s solution?  Spend more money and more time doing what doesn’t work.

Although the exact numbers vary from study to study, in general other sources of statistics paint the same grim picture — and add to it.

Correspondent Heather Michon, for the Fluvanna Review, reports that “about 43 percent of the American adults are considered functionally illiterate, with over 32 million unable to read at a third-grade level.”

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) assesses proficiency in adult literacy, numeracy and problem-solving.  According to the latest study (it’s conducted by decade), 34% have “basic literacy” levels — which Wylie authors describe as meaning “they can read and write at a basic, or fourth- to fifth-grade level.”  To make the implications of this clearer, they further explain that most in this group “cannot identify the link leading to the organization’s phone number from a website with several links, including ‘contact us’ and ‘FAQ.'”

A further 18% have “below-basic” literacy or are completely non-literate.  This is roughly equivalent to (what we consider) a third-grade level or less.

Only 12% have what is considered “proficient” levels of literacy — what we consider a minimum of a ninth-grade reading level.

Let’s flip that around.  If only 12% have attained the equivalent of ninth-grade reading level, that means 88% read at the equivalent of an eighth-grade level or less.

Moreover, in this most recent “edition” of their study, PIAAC collapsed the highest two reading levels into one, because there were too few people (2%) in the highest category to warrant leaving it as a category of its own.  This, together with an overall drop in the average literacy level, suggests that the efficacy of our education is, if anything, declining.

Numeracy and the Public Education System

So we’re doing an inconsistent — if not outright bad — job of teaching reading fluency and comprehension.  How are we doing when it comes to numbers?  In that same PIACC study, U.S. adults “scored below the international average in all three categories— ranking near the very bottom in numeracy.”

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), more than 75% of 12th-grade public school students failed to test at the “proficient” level.  (This is probably a better measure than overall adult numeracy, since high school seniors have had little opportunity to forget certain elements of math from disuse.)  Due to the nature of the testing, it’s difficult to make a clear comparison between this and everyday skills.

According to the NAEP, “twelfth-grade students performing at the Basic level should be able to solve mathematical problems that require the direct application of concepts and procedures in familiar mathematical and real-world settings.”  Forty percent did not achieve this level of competency.

The division between categories as described by the NAEP is, in my estimation, a bit odd (puns intended), and, by and large, “basic” numeracy as indicated on the twelfth-grade assessment is probably quite adequate for anyone not going into technology, engineering or similar fields. What is most concerning here is the 40% who scored as “below basic” — and the lack of information about how far below basic the individuals in this group scored.

Some may have missed that cutoff by a hair — but other evidence suggests that many may be lacking far more basic math skills.

According to Psychology Today, “in an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.”

After identifying basic shapes, this is about as basic as geometry gets.  It’s a real life skill, used every time we need to know how much flooring, carpeting, or paint is needed, the square footage of our homes for tax purposes, or how to swap out the baking dish a recipe calls for with a different size or shape we have in the cupboard.  It’s implied in the ways we notate paper sizes, bed sheet sizes, and bedroom sizes.

It’s a skill K-6 teachers are supposed to be teaching, and they couldn’t be reliably expected to know how to do it themselves.  How can we consistently expect new students to learn skills we already failed at teaching their teachers?

Other Subject Areas

To my knowledge, there are not any wide-scale studies assessing writing ability like there are for literacy and numeracy, but we can make some general observations.  The proliferation of spelling errors, word usage errors (like confusing there, they’re, and their), and logical fallacies (primarily a critical thinking issue, but also a matter of effective communication) suggests that, as a society, we’re becoming less effective communicators.

This is unsurprising, given the decline of reading skills.  Good writers usually learn much of their skill by modeling it after what they read of good writers, so poor reading skills undermine good writing skills.

Moreover, we’re not being taught to process information and make it “our own.”  Although studies vary with regard to the exact numbers, most agree that more than half of students admit to plagiarizing.  This only includes those who knowingly plagiarized; it doesn’t address those who unwittingly plagiarized.

This is unsurprising when we consider that it’s fostered by a system of education that relies heavily on memorizing answers and producing them word-for-word on exams.  When reproducing answers word-for-word is rewarded on tests, why wouldn’t students consider this a valid technique for writing, as well?

In Unschooled, Kerry McDonald informs the reader that “US students are lagging far behind their peers in other nations, with US fifteen-year-olds ranking thirty-eighth out of seventy-one countries in math and twenty-fourth in science.”  So we’re not making up for our poor math and literacy skills with outstanding results in science.

What about creativity?  Unlikely, since “according to a 2017 Gallup report, parents of children ages ten and younger acknowledge that free play ‘fosters creativity and problem-solving,’ but they do not think these qualities are especially important.” (also Kerry McDonald, in Unschooled)  If we don’t consider creativity and problem-solving important, we aren’t likely to prioritize it — and free play has certainly been increasingly pushed aside, not encouraged.

Public Education in America & Racial Disparity

So we’re doing poorly in literacy and poorly in math, with no great tradeoffs to show in other areas, like science.  And we don’t even care about creativity or problem-solving.  But at least we’re narrowing the racial gap, right? Offering equal access to education?

Nope.

At least as of the 1990s, there was significant racial disparity in skill sets.

“Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum. And yet the 1992 NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in 1992 but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant.”  (Source)

I haven’t seen anything indicating that this discrepancy has notably improved.

The same article also says:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of 26- to 33-year-old men who held full-time jobs in 1991 thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites. But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.

Skin color is not related to IQ, so what we should see is comparable numbers across ethnicities within the same school system — but these numbers are not close.  I’m sure there are some other influential factors, like economics and neighborhood demographics.  But, taken as a whole, these numbers illustrate (at least) two things:

1. the effectiveness of the government-run education system is not especially impressive.
2. the government-run education system is not providing equal access to the same education.

Anyone (attentive) from an area with both high- and low-income communities within the city or county can tell you — based on simple observation — that funding is not distributed equitably.  “Rich” areas end up with “rich” schools, and “poor” areas end up with “poor” schools, as displayed in factors like what classes are offered, how well the building is kept up, etc.

Capitalism and a privatized system of education might produce similar discrepancies in funding.  But this is not “free trade.”  This is a government-run system that we taxpayers pay billions into every year because we’re told that doing it this way ensures everyone has the same opportunities. 

What Are We to Think?

Academic outcomes, on average, are mediocre, at best — and the system is not ensuring equal access.  So why do we insist on continually doing more of the same?  What we’re doing is not working. Spending more money to do more of the same things that are already failing is not going to magically make them work. As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is continuing to do exactly what you’ve always done, while expecting a different result.

If we want different results, we need to change what we’re actually doing, not just do more of it — and not continue defending a failing system.