A Rant on Education in America

For most US students, this is a documentary….courtesy, Neil Silberman –

All this week it is “Education Week” on NBC News.

Not that that will so much to change the way Americans educate their young.  When it was “NBC is Green” week at NBC, they still kept all the light blazing bright at 30 Rock at 3 am, so I don’t expect much, if anything.

With the exception of Dr. Ben Chavis on MSNBC, all of the guests were the usual and predictable with the usual and predictable homilies.

The only thing that makes these kind of stunts at all interesting are the opening stats – things like the US is now 37th in Math and 43rd in Reading (who does the tests is beyond me).  But I did not need Today to tell me that public education in this country stinks.  I taught for many years at both Columbia University and New York University, and while my students were bright, they were, for the most part, terribly uneducated.

In education, you get what you pay for.  My sister’s kids went to Dalton, a very expensive private school in Manhattan, and they seem to have gotten a very good education.  My nephew Brett in particular, was inspired to read by his history teacher, Mrs. Buchsbaum (wife of David Buchsbaum, who I knew as a producer at CBS News a million years ago). Bravo, Mrs. Buchsbaum. People like this are few and far between.

And so are people who will pay $40,000 a year to have their kids go to private school.

When I went to public school, (which was a long time ago), women in this country still had not been granted equal rights.  I am old enough to remember when a woman being accepted into Harvard (as opposed to Radcliffe) was big news. When I went to Williams College in 1972, we were the first class to accept women – 90 of them. So change came late.

One of the side effects of keeping women from Law School or Medical School or MBA programs was that the smartest and most driven women became teachers or nurses. That was all that was open to them in the 1950s. And so the vast majority of my very good teachers in public school were women. Very smart women. Women who would  have become something else, were society open to the concept then, which it was not.

The result was that I got a very very good public education because I was taught by very smart women. And because women had no other optin in those days, schools were able to pay them a pittance as a salary.  I can even remember discussions at District 15 on Long Island, my school district, that argued that men should in fact be paid more than women for the same teaching job.

In the 70s, when opportunities finally began to open up for women, they left in droves to go to law or medicine or business.

And the educational system should have responded by raising salaries so that they were competitive with law firms or MBAs.

But they didn’t.

And so the quality of those who became teachers deteriorated.

You get what you pay for.

And the Teacher’s Union protected the ranks of increasingly bad teachers and their guaranteed tenure.

Of course, there are still great teachers like Mrs. Buchsbaum, and many are still driven to teach by a passion and a calling.

But we can’t base the future of our country on the hope that a few smart people will be drawn by a passion and a calling,

No more than we would entrust our lives to doctors who were paid a pittance but hopefully really loved medicine.

I have other nieces and nephews who are in a public education system where they spend their days doing ‘marketing campaigns’ for tomato sauce… at the age of 12.  (As opposed to reading and maths).

What kind of an education are they receiving? Would ‘none’ be a good answer?

On Today they ‘visited’ a ‘school’ in Miami where the curriculum is based on the web – entirely. “They have no pencils and no paper” the idiot correspondent breathlessly reported.  They download tunes they like from iTunes to ‘study’ music.  Their phys ed is done on Wii. They watch youtube videos to ‘learn about the world’.

So things could be worse than designing a marketing campaign to sell tomato sauce, I suppose.

The only redeeming moment in NBC’s coverage was an all too fast interview with Dr. Ben Chavis on MSNBC.

Chavis is supposed to be ‘beyond the fringe’ and so only got one of those fast, interconnect, 3 questions and we’re out moments on the sister cable channel.

Too bad.

When asked what he would do to ‘fix’ America’s schools, Chavis gave a great answer.

“Reading and Math”.

“and that’s it?” the startled and not too well educated (though attractive) anchor responded.

“That’s it”.

After all the hoopla about Wii and Youtube and more technology for teachers it was refreshing to hear.

Alas, it was also on at 3pm on Sunday on MSNBC.

This is the only advantage of being  sick on Sunday.

But I don’t think too many other people saw it.

Too bad, Dr. Chavis.