Today was our district’s last “quiet day.” Teachers and other staff have been meeting and preparing the last two days—longer for new teachers—for our first day of classes. Based on registration figures, I will have 152 students this year, spread out over six classes. The largest class will have 34 students, the smallest 19. I will be teaching “regular” English to approximately 75 seniors, Advanced Placement (college-level) English to about 50 seniors, and the remainder will be in a Creative Writing class, grades 9-12—my only elective class. In addition to these classes, I will meet once a week with my “advisory group” (something somewhat similar to Homeroom when I was a kid), comprised of about 15 kids. So—it’s time to take a deep breath and dive in. We’ll be coming up for air again in late December. That might smack of sounding a bit melodramatic to the average reader, but teachers will certainly understand the sentiment. I predict that my postings will become considerably shorter after this week (after I finish posting a few things I wrote last week to get the blog started), but I hope that won’t keep people from responding. So now, as promised:
Myth Number One: Public Education in the United States is failing.

To begin with, we must establish that the United States’ model for public education is as unique as its Constitution. No other country in the world dares to undertake what we attempt—to offer the same level of education to every child in the U.S., regardless of any extenuating circumstances such as innate talent (or lack thereof), level of intelligence, or ability to concentrate for extended periods of time on anything . Remember—we are offering this to everyone—for 13 years, mind you—and that offer is precious to us, for it sets us apart from every other country on earth. But to think we can successfully deliver an equal education to every citizen is disingenuous at best. Those mitigating circumstances do exist, and they are compounded by the fact that, like their students, not all teachers are created equal, either. And that reality exists for all teachers, including those who are truly dedicated to doing the best job they possibly can, every day of the year, every year of their career. Even for those who possess that dedication (and , I contend, that’s the vast majority of us), the truth is that some teachers are better at reaching kids than others. And while I truly believe that most—most—teachers are doing at least yeoman’s service to their craft, the sad truth exists that some teachers have no business being teachers. For whatever reasons, ranging from uninteresting personalities to a dislike of children, they are not effective at what they do. But in the majority of cases, those people don’t last long in the profession; they couldn’t possibly. Either their failure is discovered through the tenure system early on (more on that later), or they leave the profession out of their own sense of failure and frustration. Either way, they don’t last long. And that leaves a very tiny minority of inept teachers who have managed to fall through the system’s cracks and who remain in public education for an entire career. And then, on the other side of the desk, there are all the myriad factors that affect student learning daily; home life, amount of sleep, the abovementioned factors concerning ability level, personal relationship distractions, peer-pressure, self-esteem and insecurity issues, nutrition, tardies and absences, classroom interruptions—all of these and much more affect what goes on in every classroom every day. Add to this the sociological factors that exist in every region of the country (ethnicity, socioeconomic levels, religion, etc.) and the increasingly prevalent expectation that our schools must be all things—parent, nurturer, provider of nutrition, imparter of principles of moral decency, and above all, babysitter—to all who enter our hallowed halls, and you’ve thrown some enormous monkey wrenches into the idealistic notions behind our public education goals.
And yet—and yet—the majority (in many regions, the vast majority)of students who go to our schools graduate with a high school diploma, which means essentially that they are prepared at the very least to enter the workplace and take their places in society—or to continue their education in our trade schools, colleges, and universities. Politicians point out that our inner city schools are not sufficiently providing education to our minorities, and they are right. But this failure is due to sociological issues—not to the failure of the educational system, as so many politicians claim (or, at least, count on the public to infer). And it isn’t difficult to see why they deflect the blame. When we’ve shown such a marked inability to repair our socio-economical inequities overall, it becomes politically more convenient to point fingers at a symptom of such failures than at their roots; when a nation faces the social issues we face, the failures of our schools to provide equal education to minorities and the poor are symptomatic of a much larger problem, not the cause of the problem, and our schools cannot be expected to bear the burden alone of solving our social ills. This becomes even more apparent when we factor in studies demonstrating that children’s patterns of thinking are firmly established by the age of seven. Thus, a child’s potential to develop holistically is dependent on the home environment, which we already knew. And still, politicians include these socio-economical factors to indicate that public education is failing our children. One needn’t be a student of logic to see the fallacious nature of such thinking. The question we should be asking is, “Failing at what?”
Besides the aforementioned socio-economically driven “failures” of public education, you’re likely to hear that we are failing to “keep up” with other countries in the way we prepare our children for an ever-increasingly complex world and that we are not preparing every student for college. The greatest flaw in the latter part of that criticism is the notion that any country prepares every student for college, or even deems it necessary to do so. Practically speaking, what society on earth could possibly believe that a college-level education is necessary for every citizen to attain success in his or her occupation? Not everyone is cut out for college, nor does everyone need to be. Then, using international standardized test scores as indicators, detractors go on to say that we are clearly being outpaced educationally by an ever growing number of foreign countries, resulting in us no longer being prepared to “lead the world” in technology. In tomorrow’s posting, I will try to demonstrate the fallacy in that line of thinking. In the meantime, I will merely reiterate my contention that, given the idealistic nature of our model of public education and the enormous challenges that such a model is inevitably going to encounter, the United States public education system—far from being a failure—is remarkably successful. I am by no means alone in believing that it’s still by far the finest education system on the planet.
Tomorrow: Myth Number Two—the fallacy of using standardized test scores for global comparisons.