American Education Under Heavy Fire
The ongoing critique of American education seems to be quickening and changing shape. Just a few assessments have been listed below. Primarily they have been written by highly reputable individuals at the top rungs of the U.S. academic community:
Moral Principles in Education (Dewey, 1909)
Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1919)
A Nation At Risk (Commission of the U.S. Department of Education, 1983);
The End of Education (Postman, 1996)
Wise Moves In Hard Times (Leslie & Fretwell, 1996)
Escape From The Ivory Tower (Lempert, 1996)
An Education For Our Time (Bunting, 1998)
A Nation Still At Risk (Heritage Foundation, 1998);
Reinventing Ourselves (Ed. Smith & McCann, 2001);
Greater Expectations (AAC&U, 2002);
Declining By Degrees (Ed. Hersh & Merrow, 2005);
A Larger Sense Of Purpose (Shapiro, 2005);
Our Underachieving Colleges (Bok, 2006);
Excellence Without A Soul (Lewis, 2006).
The Shame of the Nation (Kozol, 2006).
Only Connect: The Way To Save Our Schools (Crew, 2007)
Punctuating this ever-rising concern about American higher education, was the U.S. Department of Education’s September 2005 formation of a “Commission for the Future of Higher Education.” An August 2006 draft of its report states:
“Our year-long examination of the challenges facing higher education has brought us to the uneasy conclusion that the sector’s past attainments have led our nation to unseemly complacency about its future.”
Subsequently, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education issued a “Report Card” on U.S. higher education in the context of global competitiveness. It reported a downward trend in U.S. college completion rates, as tuitions across the country are climbing. Center president, Peter Callan warned:
“Other nations have approached the need for higher rates of college participation and completion with a real sense of urgency we haven’t yet seen in the U.S.”
In addition, there are factors at play that signal a potential sea change in public opinion concerning higher education reform. Specifically, Deborah Wadsworth, former president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nationally respected organization that measures public thinking in complex issues, stated:
“If college is increasingly viewed as absolutely essential and simultaneously less available, American society is approaching a much more unstable situation. Our society is predicated on an ideology of social mobility. At the heart of that tenet is the belief that hard work will pay off and that people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It follows, then, that if higher education becomes the only path to success and, at the same time, less available to sigificant numbers of individuals, that sense of mobility will be threatened…..if access to decent jobs or entree to lucrative careers narrows, people who are now scrambling to address the cost of higher education may begin to feel that this ticket to a middle-class life is being priced out of their reach and respond with real hostility. I have few doubts that emergence of such a scenario would lead to more public support for higher education reform.”
Among the many evaluations, five are particular illuminating to The Bellows Foundation:
1. The extraordinary two-year study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) culminating in a 2002 report: “Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College.”
2. The body of work by the late Earnest Boyer—–a natural fit with the vision of Greater Expectations.
3. The critical analysis—The End of Education (1995)—by the late Neil Postman, which illuminates a possible connection between (i) student engagement, empowerment and “character development”, on the one hand, and (ii) the prerequisite of each student developing his or her own personal “great narrative” to serve as one’s foundation and compass.
4. The extensive inquiry that resulted in Declining By Degrees (2005) and its complementary PBS documentary of the same name. Edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, the inquiry culminated with fifteen essays from distinquished individuals with considerable insight about the workings of contemporary education.
5. An eloquent and penetrating presentation by thirteen students from six colleges at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in October 2004. These students described what they believed to be missing in their four-year undergraduate education and outlined the desired outcomes of an off-campus integrative and experiential learning environment anchored in powerful creative collaboration. Hoping to recapture the powerful impact of their presentation, Bellows invited these students to share their innovative thoughts again at a four-day Colloquium at the Circle Z Ranch in Patagonia, Arizona in January of 2005.
The fundamental concern expressed by these critiques is the lack of relevance of American education to the difficult realities of the times. But, in spite of an extraordinary level of heavily researched critique from all sides, the permanent gridlock of American education continues to withstand the heaviest broadsides and resist vitally needed change. The elements of this fundamental concern are as follows:
American education is imploding: the student dropout rate has reached epidemic proportions:
An ominous and unacceptable student dropout rate must be reversed. Current research indicates that the student dropout rate is 59.5% in public institutions of higher education and 42.7% for private institutions of higher education (2007 American College Testing Report on Student Retention). For the nation’s public high schools, The Gates Foundation published The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts in 2006 which stated: “Each year, almost one third of all public high school students—and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans—fail to graduate from public high school with their class. Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education.”
American education does not prepare its students for the American workforce:
Across the board, American employers, who face mounting global competition, are extraordinarily unhappy with the lack of preparedness of high school and college graduates as entry-level employees. The complaints include deficiencies in critical thinking, writing, reading, math skills, problem-solving, and social skills.
From an HR executive of Coca-Cola Company:
“A surprising number of our new management hires don’t seem to be able to ‘connect the dots’; they don’t seem to understand the ramifications of what they say or do. They just come into a situation without having given any thought to the dynamics of the environment they have entered. And this is in a global economy in which all the multinationals are downscaling, which means that our new hires have to work harder and be even faster on their feet.”
From an HR executive at Intel:
“We have found that most of our new employees, including, in particular, the MBAs, don’t know how to write a concise, coherent report. We have had to develop an internal school that we put them all through to develop this elementary skill. Furthermore, while it used to be that we could hire the average college graduate and work them up through our ranks, we have experienced such growth and the competitive environment has become so intense, that we have to be much more selective. And, even then, our new employees are lacking in such fundamental things as work ethic, socialization in the collaborative work environment, adapting to the competitive pace, multi-tasking as a way of life, and being congenial and team-oriented, instead of being just out for themselves.”
From an HR executive at a large non-profit organization:
“As our organization grows, we realize that it wasn’t enough for our new hires to be enthusiastic and hard-working. We need individuals who can jump into project management, marketing and fund-raising activities, accounting and reporting problems, and situations presenting complicated coordination issues. We need people with more organizational savvy, and an ability to get things done without getting bogged down in the bureaucracy.”
American education does not prepare its students to participate in or protect America’s democratic processes:
The traditional ends of American education, namely, preparing students for creative, productive and responsible participation in society, have been greatly marginalized in favor of specialization with none of these objectives addressed.
In its present state, American education threatens a key American ideal: The American Dream:
In failing to prepare students for a creative, productive and responsible participation in our global society, American education contributes to the deterioration of The American Dream and may thus invite potential future social instability. In other words, colleges and universities that shortchange their students also contribute to a deteriorating American job market. Deborah Wadsworth, former president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nationally respected organization that measures public thinking in complex issues, states:
“If college is increasingly viewed as absolutely essential and simultaneously less available, American society is approaching a much more unstable situation. Our society is predicated on an ideology of social mobility. At the heart of that tenet is the belief that hard work will pay off and that people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It follows, then, that if higher education becomes the only path to success and, at the same time, less available to significant numbers of individuals, that sense of mobility will be threatened…..if access to decent jobs or entree to lucrative careers narrows, people who are now scrambling to address the cost of higher education may begin to feel that this ticket to a middle-class life is being priced out of their reach and respond with real hostility. I have few doubts that emergence of such a scenario would lead to more public support for higher education reform.”
American education ignores its crucial societal purposes and has become corrupted by governmental intervention:
In September 2006, after masterminding the No Child Left Behind legislation, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was initiating “long-overdue reform” in higher education to increase U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. (see Inside HigherEd, The Spellings Plan, September 26, 2006). How much more governmental redirection and interference with curricula can American education suffer as it turns all attention to buttressing market economy competitiveness, rather than safeguarding an education that broadens student perspective and sense of responsibility, develops personal creativity and expands personal capacity for innovation? Governmental intervention has clearly marginalized the traditional ends of education that historically have served a vital societal purpose. In doing so, it has, in a ham-handed manner, suppressed the very education that, by its nature, can potentially create the illuminating learning environment within which innovation is spawned and, if nurtured, could become the uniquely American cornerstone of our economic competitiveness in the global economy. Instead, we have a further stultification of American education that could not come at a worse time. In other words, not only is American education not addressing the problems of our times, but it is being transformed by rising governmental interference into a institutional force in our society that is making matters significantly worse.
Much of American education has abandoned the values of the commons for the values of the market economy:
The standard complaint about undergraduate education used to be “publish or perish,” the overriding focus of faculty members of colleges and universities on their research, a reflection of the reward system of higher education and the intense institutional need for a steady stream of grant income to augment tuition, endowments and, in public higher education, public funding.
But, now this inattention to the teaching function at the undergraduate level has taken a more ominous turn, which has fundamentally altered the institutional value system that is, in itself, a part of their undergraduate learning environment. Dr. David L. Kirp, Professor Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley:
“Now there are signs of another seismic shift in loyalty among the academic elite—toward the individuals themselves (before, faculty loyalty as to their institution, then it shifted to their discipline). Mirroring the aspirations of their own on-the-make institutions, these superstars see themselves as academic entrepreneurs….When a university lands one of these public intellectuals or a professor who is widely esteemed by fellow scholars or someone who attracts large research grants, the result is buzz and prestige—valuable intellectual capital for the institution.”
Instead of American education occupying a separate domain from the market economy, many institutions have joined it and have shifted away from the values of the commons. Market economy forces appear to be all but irresistible and no one within American education has come forward to effectively confront this phenomenon. Dr. Kirp:
“Is there anyone who can convincingly make the case that…….there need to be spheres where ‘money is not the coin of the realm’? Lacking such a principled defense of nonmarket values, higher education may degenerate into something far less palatable than a house of learning that—as a prophetic report on undergraduate education put it nearly two centuries ago—is ‘attuned to the business character of the nation’ (Yale College report 1828). It may degenerate into just another business, the metaphor of the higher education ‘industry’ brought fully to life. But if there is to be a less dystopian future, one that revives the soul of this old institution, who is to advance it—and if not now, then when?…In years past, academic statesmen such as Clark Kerr at Berkeley, Derek Bok at Harvard and Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame could influence public opinion….That is unimaginable now—-because university presidents are constantly seeking money from power, they can hardly speak truth to power. It is interesting to note that the paradigm is about to shift from identifying public opinion as the source of power to affect educational reform. It appears that the U.S. Department of Education will soon be so identified, and, by default, academic statesmen will have had their day.”
And with the rising dominance of the U.S. Department of Education, the value system of all of American education, not just higher education, is being pulled away from its tradition focus on the values of the commons and toward the values of the market economy.
American education does not address the marked change in the way that our next generation is being socialized—–a way vastly different from that of their parents:
Equally troubling are research findings in neuroscience, social psychology and related fields that indicate our next generation is being socialized in a way vastly different from that of their parents and that the consequences of this phenomenon are not clear. The thinking processes of our youth have evolved significantly under the combined impact of unprecedented communication technology advances and the sensory barrage of the American media and entertainment industries: (i) our next generation, since birth, has been immersed in a massive barrage of television programming, film industry productions, video games, and endless advertising driven by sophisticated market research; (ii) they have entered a cyberspace unknown to earlier generations, where new ways of learning and socializing are unknown to traditional American education that may make the old ways of learning appear to be irrelevant; and (iii) in their meaning-making process, our next generation, since early age, has been massively proselytized by powerful, competing narratives from the celebrity culture, the MTV culture, the fashion industry, the video game culture and gang cultures. And, if that were not enough to contend with, all of the foregoing influences are overlaid with a dominant culture that reflects a consumerist market economy worldview and value system that many believe have marginalized the values of the commons.
The potential of American education becoming “’attuned to the business character of the nation,’….. degenerating into just another business”….. is upon us.
The degeneration of American education into just another business model is the worst cut of all, a profound 21st century reality-to-be that we must reverse. From the PBS-sponsored Declining By Degrees (2005), which was well-researched and containing comprehensive commentary from insightful members of the academic community, we hear more than enough to know we must take action immediately:
Julie Johnson Kidd, the former President of Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation and well-recognized educational foundation:
“As I reflect on this quarter century of involvement with higher education, I feel compelled to express my belief that American higher education has lost its bearings and is falling short in its vital educational mission…. to develop in our young people the depth of critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and human understanding so essential for dealing with the problems in our world today…..There is an ongoing failure of vision, imagination, and boldness when we evaluate ways to improve our institutions of higher learning. Faculties must realize that their first responsibility is to their students and that they must make the classroom experience more relevant to the “outside world”……Without the changes that such a challenge can bring, we will relegate our students to the role of commodities in a huge game of marketplace economics. The healthy, emotional, ethical, and intellectual development of our young people should be our first priority.”
Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, editors of Declining By Degrees, about their investigation of American education:
“As we began our early planning for the documentary and book project in the year 2000, we met with dozens of thoughtful observers and asked their help in identifying the most salient issues facing higher education. From those conversations we developed a potential list of authors for this volume. Later as we criss-crossed the country filming on campuses, it became increasingly clear that something in undergraduate education was seriously amiss. We found an insidious erosion of quality that we now believe places this nation at risk. The threat, it seems to us, is more serious today that it was in 1983, when the famous ‘A Nation at Risk’ report warned that our schools were ‘drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity.’ Our K-12 system, although somewhat improved from that time, continues to wallow in mediocrity, and now higher education is suffering from the same condition. The tide continues to rise, the rot is creeping upward, and time is running out.”