Hildegarde

The title today refers to a law suit filed in the state of Connecticut over twenty years ago by parents of students in the Hartford Public Schools, demanding that Connecticut either provide equal funding for all the state’s schools or allow students from inner city systems (like Hartford’s) to attend neighboring suburban schools (like those in West Hartford).  The Sheff’s parents won the case, but as far as I know, nothing has come of the decision in their favor.

Here’s the thing–in the US public schools, the name of the game is retention and graduation rates.  The larger percentage of the pupils in your system who have high innate academic ability and/or serious parental support for academics (reading in the home, etc), the higher you can set your standards and still get the retention and graduation percentages you want.

Some of the suburban public school districts in the US can match or even outdo what the best of the private schools can offer–New Trier in Winetka, Illinois, for instance, or (yes) West Hartford.  Standards are high and rigorous.  Advanced placement courses are a way of life.  Graduates who go on to four year colleges top ninety percent.

The thing is, these schools are not really bucking the trends I’ve been talking about.  If the composition of their student populations changed, the chances are good they’d start dumbing down their curricula just like everybody else.  They can offer what they offer because accidents of geography carefully exclude the people–poorer, newly immigrant, from highly dysfunctional families–likely to bring their percentages down.

The same thing can be said of the private schools.  Opponents of school choice measures aer always declaring that actual outcomes–scores on standardized high-stakes tests–are no better for private schools (mostly parochial) included in choice plans  than for public schools in the same area, but they miss the point.  What parents buy is not really highe standards or different curricula, but different peer groups and different institutional cultures. 

In the US, however, I’d say that all but the most high-end of the private schools have the same problem the public schools do, and the same problem the universities do.  Exeter has a Classical Curriculum, where students can choose to study Greek and Latin the way their predecssors did a hundred years ago,  with more emphasis on modern math and science.  Most private schools, though, even good ones, either skimp on the Humanities or don’t bother to teach them at all.

My younger son was at a very high end country day school when he was being handed trivial silliness like Touching the Void.  I mean,  there’s nothing horrendously wrong with that book, but I could see no possible reason to assign it in an English class.  What he wasn’t being assigned was what I expected him to be:  Dickens, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Sophocles, something that had something to do with the intellectual history of the civilization he’s supposed to be inhabiting.

What’s more, the private schools are subjected to a pressure similar to the ones on public schools, except that instead of being brought by bureaucrats, they’re being brought by parents.  When parents spend $25,000 to send their kid to Wonder Prep, they don’t want to hear “not really college material.”  They think they’re paying to make sure their kid succeeds, and they therefore hold the school responsible for that success.

Some of the schools–back to Exeter, again, and Andover, and places like that–have endowments so large that they don’t have to care.  Most of them do have to care, and they bend when they have to.

But all of this simply comes down to what I started out with, which is that the schools–public, parochial or private–do not exist to do what we think they exist to do.  They do not exist to educate the next generation in any sense.  Instead, they exist as sorting devices for colleges and businesses, and as paper “evidence” of the community’s commitment to “inclusiveness,” and as babysitting facilities for busy parents. 

At the present moment, neither employers nor parents like me gets what we want from schools, public or private. 

But I don’t think the public school system has to collapse in one big heap for that to change.  I think it only has to wither away.

I don’t know what the situation is like in Canada or Australia, but the US has no pre-set national curriculum that all schools must follow or approximate.  Private schools are free to teach creationism or the worship of Cthulu, Einstein or Mother Goose, and they’ve got a SCOTUS case to back them up.

The other thing US families have got is the ability to home school without supervision in most states, and private schools that are not required to hire state certified teachers.  It does not take a lot of change or reform to make the mechanisms available for challenging the present system.

The harbinger of the end of the present system is the rise of the online proprietary (for-profit) universities, because they rise and fall by their ability to get people hired.  And that means they rise and fall by their ability to teach students the skills employers expect them to have.

It’s not quite accurate to say that employers are not trying to leave the system, but to reform it.  There’s a small proprietary school in my area that is working face to face with area employers to identify what those employers want and how to ensure that students get it.

If these schools get better results for employers, employers will prefer them, and since they’re not subsidized, they’re careful to meet the demand.  What’s more, they often provide new ways of approaching the learning of the skills involved–I can tell you, from experience, that it’s much more effective for most students to have their writing corrected and criticized in real time on line and one on one than to hand a paper into a professor at the front of a classroom with twenty students in it, take their C and shrug.

If the proprietary schools begin to take a significant number of students away from the lower ends of the four year and community college systems, what will go out with the wash is the Cultural Studies boondoggle.  Proprietary schools do not offer tenure.  They do not pretend to do research.  Their faculty exists to teach and to teach effectively, and random forays into the social construction of the gerund are not tolerated for long.

That will leave the four year colleges, if they want to survive at all, in a position where they either have to accept what they are (the way we transmit civilization down through the centuries) or die.

And that, you see, I find a very interesting prospect.