Hildegarde

This is going to be just a little thing today, because I’m gearing up for something.  For those of you who like to read up, part of what I’m gearing up to concerns two poems, “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, and “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.

Actually, what I’m gearing up to is a thing about religion, tradition, and morality, but I’ll get to it tomorrow, I hope.

I would like to address Muddled in Moscow’s confusion for a minute.

First, there are many really excellent schools in the United States, both public and private.  

My guess is that at least two thirds of American students go to at least good schools and the top twenty-five percent go to really excellent ones. 

And there are places outside NY State–Connecticut has the best overall public school systems in the country, and then there are really stellar places in Winetka, Illinois, in the suburbs around LA, etc. 

But the first thing I want to know is if the people you know went to New York City schools or schools elsewhere in NY State?

American schools adhere pretty closely to local control.   It’s entirely possible for two schools in adjoining towns to have entirely different curricula, facilities, and, for that matter, socioeconomic make-up. 

Some states centralize some fuctions at the state level, but many states consist of dozens of local school districts run by local school boards with minimal accountability to anybody outside the locality.

That said, schools in suburban New  York towns–in Westchester  County, for instance–are often indeed excellent, but New York City schools are something else.

There are four kinds of NY City schools:  the public, the private, the parochial, and the public-selective high schools.

Virtually all New York  City parents who are middle class or above send their kids to private schools, and quite a few parents who fall distinctly under the middle class send their kids to parochial schools.

The exceptions are the competitive admission public high schools, like Bronx Science, for which kids must apply and by which they can be rejected. 

Outside of one interesting exception–P.S. 6, on the Upper East Side, the most monied neighborhood in NYC–the NYC public schools are an unmitigated disaster.  

These are the places you hear about where fewer than a tenth of students read at grade level, kids graduate from high school unable to do simple arithmatic, and there are metal detectors, rando drug sweeps, and the occasional knife fight.

Similar situations exist in Washington, D.C. and inner city Los Angeles. 

These are places where the middle class and above have simply abandoned the public schools altogether.  They send their kids to local private schools where they get very good educations, and that’s that.

To give you an idea, however, of how vast a difference there is between schools in the US, consider the following.

If you eliminate black and Hispanic students from the statistics on educational attainment, American students actually outperform students in every country of the world but two in every single subject area, including mathematics.

No, the issue isn’t race–it’s what goes on in schools with high poverty levels, which is most large cities are likely to have disproportionate numbers of certain categories of racial minorities. 

You’d do the same thing simply by eliminating the stats on the inner city schools.

Similar problems exist in some rural schools–remember, each town runs its own school system.  So if you live in town where the majority of the population thinks education is just a luxury and educated people are uppity snobs, that’s going to be reflected in the standards your school uses, the teachers it hires, even the culture of the school itself.

I don’t get the kids who graduate from Wilton  High School, where they’re required to take coordinated sequences in hitory and literature (one sequence in American, one in world starting with the Greeks),  one full year of American government, si courses in arts (history of painting and sculpture, history of theater, history of music), and on and on and on.

Send your kids to the Wilton, Connecticut, public schools. They’ll get one of the best educations available in the world.  It’s better than all but the very top rank even of US private schools.

But they won’t end up in my classrooms.  The kids who end up in my classrooms went either to inner city public schools, or to rural schools witout much use for education, or–and this is the kicker–to better schools in districts where there is just no political advantage in fighting parents.

Places like Wilton or Scarsdale, New York, have the kinds of schools they do because they’re full of parents with first rate educations who want the same for their children.

In town where the mix is not so heavily towards the well educated parent, you get a fair number of parents who make very decent incomes, but who were never “good at school” themsleves, and who tend to take it personally if their Little Darling gets a C. 

At that point, the district has to start worrying about law suits.  So they don’t.  They create tracks with often wildly divergent curricula–one thing for the “gifted students,” another for the ones who aren’t going to do any work anyway, and whose parents will back that up.

One of the interesting things over the last few years has been to watch the response to the “high stakes testing” requirement of the No Child Left  Behind Act.

I’m not going to go into the idiocy of thinking that if a student fails it must be the teacher’s fault, but beyond that there is the fact that students must take “competency exams” at various levels IF the district is going to accept federal money.

Note the IF.  Not all districts opt to take the money.

But note something else–the tests do NOT determine if the kid is to be passed on to the next grade.  They do NOT determine if the kid is to be allowed to graduate from high school.  They are NOT sent to colleges and universities as part of the admissions process.

Schools deemed “failing” must find a way for stdents whose parents want to to go to other schools, and that’s largely it.

Middle class parents whose children fail these tests almost universally attack the tests and demand they be halted–the same is true of state-run mastery testing. 

And that doesn’t even go into the fact that these tests do not test anything really useful, as far as I can see.  They certainly don’t test cultural reach or a general body of knowledge. 

So the first thing I’d do is ask your friends if they came from NY City or one of the suburbs, and then if they went to public, private or parochial schools.

And if they went to school in Westchester Country–well, yes, they’d have gotten an excellent education.

But my kids don’t live in Westchester County.