Educators See Grim Prospects

When it comes to the state of American public education, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, doesn’t go out of his way to project a rosy glow.

He’s an ambling bear of a guy who believes the schools are awful, the students appallingly uninformed and that current demands for more testing, more regulation and higher standards are sadly misguided.

“A kid who can’t jump a 2-foot hurdle is not going to be able to jump 3 feet just because you raise it,” Shanker said Friday. “He’s going to get out of the game.”

Shanker was speaking at a Claremont Graduate School forum on “Education and the Revitalization of America.”

Among the other panelists were Clifton R. Wharton, chairman and chief executive officer of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Assn., who said that by 1992 the majority of workers will be minorities or children of immigrants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Unless they acquire technical skills and professional work habits in school they will not be equipped to do the jobs the work force will demand. Nor, he said, without a massive commitment to improving their education now will they be able to pay the Social Security taxes for all the people who will then be retired.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian philosopher and secretary of education for Sao Paulo, Brazil, argued for a notion of “history as possibility” in which people would be not only objects of history but its agents as well.

Mary Poplin, a Claremont Graduate School education professor, also urged an end to the old behaviorist theory of education, which saw learning as something a teacher gave to a passive student. Instead she argued for a new concept of education that recognizes that it is the students, not the teachers, who are the schools and who regulate learning.

Despite their diverse viewpoints, all the panelists agreed that education was in need of not just reform but total transformation.

Only 20% of all public high school graduates can write a simple, one-paragraph letter to a manager of a supermarket applying for a job, Shanker said. And only 4.9% can figure out a train or bus schedule.

One reason, he said, is that we mix kids of different ability in the same room, which is commendable, but then we don’t allow any “variety within classrooms to develop those individual differences.”

The other major flaw in American public education, said Shanker, is its conviction that learning consists of getting students to sit still and be quiet five or six hours a day while the teacher stands in front of the room and lectures. “If I forced my little kids at home to sit still for five hours a day, someone would come and get me for child abuse,” he said. “But in school if your kid moves around, they say, ‘Come and get your kid. He’s disturbed. He ought to be in special education.’ ”

According to Shanker, there is no relationship between success in school and making some later contribution: “We find that the overwhelming majority of people who make some contribution later on in the world were not in the top half of their graduating class either in high school or in college, which essentially means that there are other aspects of intelligence much important than the narrow ones we deal with in school.”

As to where educators might look for new learning models, Shanker suggested that perhaps there are lessons to be learned from institutions that have demonstrated competence in teaching students of different abilities in the same classroom. “People have to look at one-room school houses. How do they handle the kids? How do they get kids to learn on their own, to help each other, to use other resources? I think we are going to have to look at a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop. How does one scout master deal with 60 kids, all of whom are doing different things?”

He also took issue with the notion that nothing can be done about the decline in schools until the public can be persuaded to vote higher school taxes. “If we sit around and say we are not going to make any changes until we get more money, we are going to wait a long time.” Teachers and school management first have to demonstrate that they can put aside narrow self-interests for the benefit of children. Then, Shanker said, the money will flow in, as has already happened in cities like Rochester, N.Y., and Toledo and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Stagnant Test Routine

But the single most important thing that could be done to improve the schools, said Shanker, is to change the assessment system: “We’ve got an entire school system from top to bottom that is essentially based on a multiple choice exam. If you are a school principal and you know that on an annual basis your school is going to appear in the newspaper saying, ‘This is your place on these tests,’ you wouldn’t waste a minute getting kids to really like anything.”

As a result, he said, schools neglect the much more profound skills of writing, persuasion and organization of one’s thoughts.

Although many educators are thinking and talking about transforming education, so far, said Shanker, he hasn’t seen many concrete results. “I’ve been running around the country for a decade and I can’t send you to 10 schools in this country where” a real transformation is taking place.