Of all the broken things the pandemic has revealed about our country, you can make a good case that the state of American education came out looking more battered than just about anything else.
There’s the stranglehold that the teachers unions have over our public schools. (And the influence those unions seem to have over our public health organizations.) There’s the war over masking our students — and the inability of the adults in charge to have an adult conversation about trade-offs and risks. There’s the revelation, via Zoom, that students might not be learning much of anything. (Besides obsessing over race.)
There’s the decline of the American university, captured with love on Netflix’s new series “The Chair.” Colleges and universities have 1.5 million fewer students today than they did five years ago. Men, according to a story out today in The Wall Street Journal, account for more than 70% of that drop. Soon, university women will outnumber men by two to one. It’s an astonishing gender gap that would perhaps generate more alarm if we weren’t already focused on skyrocketing tuition and student debt.
When I think of the sorry state of American schooling, though, I think mostly of a boy named Shemar.
He’s a 12-year-old from East Baltimore and the main character of this devastating investigation by the brilliant reporter Alec MacGillis. The story focuses on the students left behind by remote learning and the indefensible gap between those students and the kids who have pods, and private tutors, and reliable wi-fi and helicopter parents who ensure they don’t fall behind.
When anyone suggests the Delta variant means schools should keep their doors closed, that remote learning can go on forever, I send them MacGillis’s story. When anyone talking about justice and equality suggests that learning loss isn’t something that should be measured right now — last week the head of the L.A. teachers union actually said “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. . . They know the words insurrection and coup” — I think of Shemar.
This week is back-to-school week here at Common Sense. In lieu of three-ring binders and fresh highlighters — I love school supplies — we have a really excellent line-up of pieces starting tomorrow with a feature about the explosion in American homeschooling.
There are some five million children in this country being educated in their living rooms. This is double the number from just two years ago. Who are they? Why did these parents — of every race and class and state— yank their children from traditional schools? And what does their choice say about the future of American education and of the country?
When that piece is published tomorrow morning, I will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, which is 5782.
I have always hated New Year’s Eve (the Gregorian one). In part, because of the inflated expectations. But in part it’s because it never felt like the real beginning of the year.
Here’s what I wrote about Rosh Hashanah in a column for the Times a few years ago:
December feels like the year’s nadir. Everything about September — the season change, the sweater weather, the new school year — feels like a new beginning, though a wise friend pointed out to me that September is actually the time when everything in nature begins the process of dying. That the Jewish year begins at a time of decay is an audacious assertion of hope, a reminder of the possibility of renewal.
So whether you are Jewish or not, whether you believe in God or not, allow me to wish you a happy new year, a new beginning, a new season, a chance to take stock of your life and to begin again. Or at the very least to buy yourself some new pencils.
A new story every day this week. Stay tuned.
After residency, I opened up a medical practice in my home town, and though I had no children yet, managed to get myself elected to the county school board in the very same district where I had attended high school and what was then called primary school. I was hoping to bring some experience and perspective - even help to make some changes. Boy was I naïve.
The school system, which as a child I'd always perceived as orderly and goal-oriented, had become chaos. Make educational changes? You have to be kidding. We spent our time refereeing grievances brought by the teachers' union, the service personnel union, the parents, students - just about everybody - against the system. One local newspaperman had it perfect: The school system had become a giant school bus, with a driver who had an accelerator and a brake pedal. The rest of the seats were filled with students, teachers, supervisors, union hacks, cafeteria workers, janitors - and of course, lawyers for all the above. At each of their seats was a giant brake pedal. The moment any one of them got his panties in a twist, he could stand on his brake with both feet and bring the entire system to a grinding halt.
Which, of course, they did. The school board was powerless to perform a single act that made learning simpler, faster, more organized, less expensive to the taxpayer. We were powerless to cut costs; as a child, we'd had one bus - full - make a morning and afternoon run through our valley. Now, I watched three buses - nearly empty - make the same runs. The costs were staggering. The school board office had grown from four people to over a hundred in the intervening years. The Board itself? We were limited de facto to lobbying the public at election time for more, new, fancier, brighter schools - at exorbitant cost. I earned the hatred of the entire system by a) being the first board member in that county's history to publicly oppose tax increases for new school construction and b) when the union president testified at a board meeting in favor of demolishing and rebuilding our "old" school buildings, I simply asked her how old were the buildings at Oxford. (She had to look "Oxford" up, by the way.)
Don't think for a minute that the school administration and teachers' unions are natural enemies or that they balance each others' interests for the public good. They are natural allies and behave that way - against the public and the children they purport to educate. The entire system is a bloated mess - a full-employment scheme in which education, when it occurs - and that is very rare - is merely collateral damage.
I believe there is one possible way to get our children well and truly educated: school choice. Now, neither the system nor the unions give a tinker's damn about what you think. A man with a gun (the sheriff - the county taxing authority in my state) comes and takes your money in the form of taxes and gives it to the "system." The system's goal is not education - it is to prevent you from taking your complaints to the newspaper. Period. Give the parents back their own money and let them choose their schools and old-fashioned competition will do the rest. This pandemic/lockdown is the perfect trigger for universal school choice. As the Democrats say, let's not let this crisis go to waste.
Look at those university admission numbers (and the graduation numbers are even more bleak - men are less likely than women to graduate), and it's clear that 20 years from now, we'll be talking about the plight of men in our culture. For now, though, we just continue to blindly pile on, blaming masculinity for all of our cultural problems.