Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Educational Realist: The courts have been the biggest bane of public education. It supported the progressive educators, or in many cases created rights that not even progressive educators had dreamed up. Progressive educators, who wouldn’t have been able to get a foot in anywhere were it not for this reality.

So while I’ll read the book, but if it doesn’t mention the tremendous damage the courts have done, then that book still needs to be written.

The courts don’t care about reality or expenses. When the federal government dreamed up the unfunded mandate of special education, the courts were there to expand and increase the costs to the states and school. The courts declared that kids who don’t speak English deserve an education too, which the federal government then expanded to mean that anyone who isn’t “academically proficient” in English and speaks a language other than English is coded as an English Language Learner. Which means that over 50% of the kids coded ELL were born here and think of English as their native language. A significant chunk of ELL kids are *third* generation citizens. And of course, the courts declared that, even though states have no say in federal immigration policy, they can be forced to educate all non-citizens.

The federal government has done nothing but create absurd mandates for forty years, beginning with the original ESEA. Both progressives and conservatives have done much to increase the demands on schools, both determined to ignore reality.

And with all that, scores are still up substantially in elementary and middle school. Despite keeping more kids in school, our high school scores haven’t (yet) dropped.
Yes, we could be doing better. But what’s amazing is despite the determination of the courts and the federal government of all political persuasions to ignore reality and implement “progressive” education, the schools aren’t terrible.

I would quibble with it being the “first narrative account” of education reform, with or without the “make sense of”. Larry Cuban, Diana Ravitch, Rick Hess, have all written accounts of education reform that explain what actually happens, if not always explaining why.

I don’t think you’re right about Common Core, which is much more progressive than traditional, and makes no mention of content. It can’t, really. Content is the purview of history and science, not math and English. English is mostly about reading texts, and to the extent that “content” is about familiarity with classic texts, then Common Core’s emphasis on non-fiction is the opposite. Moreover, the new history and science stds trying to gain acceptance are all skills, no content.

I’ve written quite a bit about Hirsch over the years, including Hirsch’s main intellectual (as opposed to political) detractor, Grant Wiggins. He and his supporters do a bit of a bait and switch. They start by saying “reading without content knowledge is IMPOSSIBLE” and then you say wait–why can’t you gain knowledge through reading?” and they say well, sure, you can, but it’s a lot harder.

In other words, high IQ people consume books to gain knowledge, but that’s harder to do with less intelligence. So the content needs to be taught explicitly. He never says this, of course.

But then there’s a big problem with content knowledge teaching, which I am certainly not opposed to in theory: the kids forget the content. It’s as if they were never taught. I just taught a history class last year, and slowed down instruction considerably, teaching less and less, and doing less through direct lecture, because the kids just don’t remember. Part of this is, I suspect, what we discussed before in the Flynn thread. But part of this is that we are demanding too much be taught. And part of it is that our goals about what is taught are just idiotic.

Seventy years ago, much of geometry instruction was nothing more than memorization of formulas. That would have been very, very boring. Our kids today wouldn’t tolerate it, and our kids back then, who often valued the opportunity of school, didn’t always learn it. We didn’t blame the teachers when they didn’t.

This may also explain the problem with Success for All fadeout. Decoding is fine, but if they can’t absorb and remember content, learning will slow way down.

* There’s no need to read this book. It can be dismissed out of hand, regardless of its merits or truthfulness. The SPLC lists its publisher, Washington Summit Publishers as a white nationalist group. Wolters can forget about this book being reviewed in any “respectable” publication. As far as the mainstream is concerned, he might as well march around with his buddies in KKK robes carrying a swastika and a burning cross.

Compare with the new movie about Dan Rather, the modestly titled “Truth”. Because Rather was fighting for a good cause (the defeat of George Bush) it was OK for him to use fake evidence. I heard Rather just this morning say on the radio that even though the documents “might” have been fake (and he had no other real evidence), they portrayed the truth and the truth was more important than a few fake documents.

So you have to understand “truth” as existing independently of any evidence – if the evidence disagrees with the “truth” we disregard the evidence – the truth is a bedrock which cannot be disturbed by mere evidence. If you understand leftism as a religion and substitute “faith” for “truth” then this all makes perfect sense.

So, Wolters might as well have written a book denying the existence of God – he will convince the true believers of the religion of equality as much with all his facts and figures as he could convince the religious with evidence of the non-existence of God.

* More needs to be made of the fact that when compared to their counterparts overseas (or south of the border) every demographic group in America does quite well. Or so I have seen it reported. If true, doesn’t this mean that American teachers in reality are doing a relatively good job? Maybe it would help if those who care about the state of our public schools started talking about “demography” instead of “race and ethnicity.”

Of course this still leaves open what is the most appropriate education for thus less academically inclined. Maybe one way to remove the stigma of vocational education would be to require all students, regardless of aptitude, to take some vocational ed. How can a person consider him- or herself truly educated if he has no first-hand experience of what hard physical labor actually feels like? Masonry would be a good place to start. And feminists might get on board with the idea that every male as well as female learn the rudiments of cooking. (I wish I had.) Emerson has some good things to say on the subject of manual labor.

I also like the idea of super-large regional high schools on the community-college model with a large cafeteria-syle curriculum. Except for a few basics — arithmetic, American history, and manual arts — every student should be the final arbiter in deciding what subjects to study.

Steve Sailer writes: My old friend Raymond Wolters, a professor of history at the U. of Delaware for 50 years, has come back from five months in the hospital waiting for his lung transplant to write the first narrative account to make sense of the fads and fashions that have roiled K–12 public schools since the failure of forced busing to prove a panacea for racial disparities in school achievement: The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967–2014.

I’m biased in favor of The Long Crusade, in part because I didn’t have much hope that Professor Wolters would live through his health woes to write it, in part because I am quoted a few dozen times in it.

(By the way, seeing myself quoted alongside more respectable figures, I have to admit that I really do come across as a sarcastic bastard. The author has to occasionally apologize for my deplorable tone, but in the second half of the book, as he focuses on 21st-century ed reform, he repeatedly uses quotes from me as his cleanup hitter to explain in clear language what really is going on.)

Despite my obvious prejudices, trust me, The Long Crusade is really good.

Wolters’ new book is a sequel to his 2009 critical history of the post–Brown v. Board of Education era, Race and Education, 1954–2007, a rare history of integration in the public schools written from a skeptical perspective (including the normally forgotten voices of white children burdened with attending newly desegregated schools).

In The Long Crusade, Wolters recounts the careers of nine education-reform stars, along with three critics (two from the racial-realist camp).

Liberals control the telling of the past, using each anniversary to recycle their myths and further distort what really happened. So Wolters’ careful chronicles are extremely valuable in providing an alternative history that accords far better with how I remember what went on than the conventional wisdom about the past typically extruded by young, historically illiterate journalists. “Because we’re not supposed to think honestly about the The Gap, nothing much ever gets accomplished to make schooling better for everybody.”

I’ve been following education statistics since 1972 when the highest performers were Orientals, followed by Caucasians, then Chicanos, and finally Afro-Americans. So not much has changed other than the labels, despite the confident promises of countless reformers to fix The Gap real soon now.

The book shows how the dominant obsession of the past half century has been The Gap. Every few years a new prophet arises proclaiming that this time we’ll get blacks and Hispanics to learn as much as whites and Asians. Because we’re not supposed to think honestly about the The Gap, nothing much ever gets accomplished to make schooling better for everybody.