How Public Schools in the U.S. Have Improved – Guest Post by Lloyd Lofthouse

As amazing as this may sound, the democratically managed public schools in the United States have been slowly and steadily improving over the last 114 years [actually longer than that], and they continue to improve in spite of the false claims to the contrary.

How much of an improvement am I talking about?

In 1900, 6.4-percent of 17/18 year olds earned a secondary-level [high school] education.

In comparison, today, 90-percent of people 25 years old or over have earned a high school degree or its equivalent, and 33-percent have attained a college degree compared to the OECD—the other 33 developed—countries that have only an average 29-percent college graduation rate.

While it’s true that South Korea, Japan and Russia have higher college graduation rates than the U.S., these countries also have higher rates of unemployment or underemployment among college graduates.

In fact, there are almost three college graduates in the United States for every job that requires a college degree.

In addition, college graduation isn’t necessary to earn a good wage, and almost 70-percent of jobs in the United States do not require a college degree. In California, for instance, auto mechanics charge $80 – $100 an hour for their work compared to college educated teachers who earn much less—an average of $26.60 an hour. Does that mean cars are more important than teaching children?

But in spite of the steady success of America’s public schools—because of A Nation at Risk that was published in 1983 during the Reagan Presidency—the public schools have repeatedly been painted as failures and public school teachers as lazy and/or incompetent, while some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats—including Bill Gates, the Koch brothers [heirs to the Koch fortune], Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad and the Walton family [heirs to the Walmart fortune]—have invested heavily in the war on public schools.

For instance, just in the 21st century, Bill Gates has spent more than $200-million to support the Common Core agenda that includes using the results of standardized student tests to rank and yank [fire] teachers in addition to closing public schools labeled failing—based on impossible demands that no country has ever achieved—and turning those schools over to corporations, while the Waltons have spent $700 million in support of vouchers and private-sector corporate Charter schools.

And under the Obama administration, the private-sector, for profit corporate Charter schools have exploded more than 500-percent, while several Stanford University studies—that don’t mention the widespread fraud taking place in the corporate Charter industry—have revealed that most of these Charters are equal to or worse than the average public schools they are replacing.

What’s tragic is that this war on public education that started with A Nation at Risk was based on flawed data.

In 1990, there was another study conducted by Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico that focused on the claims made in A Nation at Risk, and this study broke down the data that was used to condemn the U.S. public schools.

The Sandia Report—that has been ignored by every president since it came out—instead of using an overall average, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup—ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students—held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. The same thing has also happened with the international PISA tests.

How could that be?

Simple—statisticians call it Simpson’s paradox: the average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing.  And during the time period studied by A Nation at Risk, minorities were included for the first time in the overall average causing that average to drop even while each subgroup improved over the period of time studied.

In conclusion, the reason I wrote Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé was to show the challenges teachers face when working with children who live in poverty. Over 70-percent of the children I taught for thirty years lived in poverty. If you read this memoir, you will meet some of those at-risk children. You will also meet a few highly motivated students, and that allows you to compare the differences between at-risk versus highly motivated. I should mention that 23-percent of U.S. Children live in poverty—the highest rate among OECD nations. In Finland the poverty rate is less than 5-percent and in France, less than 7-percent.

There should have never been G.W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Race to the Top and his Machiavellian Common Core Standards.

Instead, the United States should have focused on developing a national early childhood education program with literacy as the goal and not college and/or career readiness, because with a love of reading, college readiness follows.

In addition, teacher training should have also been improved so all teachers eventually would go through a yearlong residency in a master teacher’s classroom with one or more years of follow up support. The 86-percent retention rate of teachers who go through yearlong residencies is dramatic when compared to the almost 50-percent retention rate of teachers who go through traditional teacher training and, even worse, the 30-percent retention rate of Teach for America [TFA] recruits, who only have 5-weeks of training and almost no follow up support.

But TFA is the program that has the support of the billionaires and President Obama, who are waging an all-out war against the incredibly successful, democratically-run public schools in the United States.

This begs an answer to one question: Have the American people been fooled? The answer is yes.

Amazon Link: Crazy is Normal

Recommended Articles:
Running with the Enemy – a Review
Lloyd Lofthouse Interview – Writing, Characters, and Vietnam
Crazy is Normal – a Review
The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova – a Review
Lloyd Lofthouse Interview – Teaching, Working in a Nightclub, and Life Experiences