FINAL GASPS?

It's sad and interesting at the same time. Make no mistake about it; unless some drastic changes take place, we are seeing the death of an institution. If not its death, then its ability to be at all functional, to be viable. That institution is the American public school system. It has several strikes against it, some being systemic. For one, probably most important, it is an institution whose basic foundation goes against the grain of the prevailing economic system – a condition it has suffered since its inception. But this government run institution was able to maneuver around the capitalist environment for over one hundred and fifty years. But the times have been “a'changin” and not in the way the Dylan song referred to back in the sixties. Today, capitalist forces are playing full court offense against any organization run by non-entrepreneurs and the public school system is dead in their sights.

That's the societal level danger that public schools are facing. Now let's look at the institution itself and we do see dire dysfunctions. And in looking at this terminal process, I believe it's best to look at it through a functional approach. Specifically, the public school system is having drastic problems meeting two – at least – essential functions any institution or organization needs to meet: production and adaptability. In terms of schools, production is measured in terms of good citizenship, knowledgeable graduates, and graduation rates. Others add to these measures. They talk of schools helping in lowering crime rates, decreasing unwanted pregnancy rates, bolstering health outcomes, and the like. Some of these are legitimate; they reflect success in meeting the functions I identified above. But we need to be careful. Schools can't do it all. But they should educate in terms of preparing youngsters to be good citizens and employable. Unfortunately, the institution is not “getting it done.” A look at one of these identified measures tells enough of the story.

Graduation rates are appalling. According to Ed H. Moore,¹ CEO of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida, three million students find school too burdensome and decide to walk away before graduation – a dropout rate of 8,300 per day. This is magnified in our urban school districts where seventeen of them have an over 50 percent dropout rate (41 percent in our 50 largest urban areas). Even when we feel we can boast – Florida just celebrated a graduation rate of 75 percent – we are still facing one in four students not graduating. For them, the one in four, we are talking about an almost certain life filled with money problems, probably marital problems, probably legal problems, etc., etc. For example, 75 percent of all crimes are committed by dropouts. We know that 90 percent of the jobs in our technically based economy demand that employees have at least a high school diploma. I think it's safe to conclude that our schools are not being productive enough.

As for adaptability, our schools don't seem to be changing fast enough. A lot of sociological (and political science) literature has been dedicated to the need for institutions and organizations to adapt to changes to their internal and external conditions. One such writer is Samuel P. Huntington.² Here is what he points out in terms of what adaptability concerns any institution or organization needs to address in order to remain healthy and even survive into the future. The most obvious concern is change and the rate of that change. Institutions in static environments naturally have an easier job at adapting – there's little need to adapt. But, of course, we are not static. We are dynamic and the rate of dynamism is increasing. This is led by technology. But even in trying to adapt to what is now old technology, such as TV, schools still have not been able to adjust to excessive TV viewing – and its socializing effects – with which most students engage. So here comes the digital world: I phones, texting, YouTube, computer games, on and on, with all their effects. All of these developments have had their negative effects on our ability to teach kids. Yes, there are the positive effects of computers; we'll see how extensive they are. But as of now, the overall effect has been to present schools and teachers with daunting challenges.

We can further analyze this function. As it turns out, according to Huntington, the age of an institution positively relates with the ability of that institution to adapt. The older, the more experienced an institution is, the more likely it is to adapt to new challenges. Huntington identifies three ways to view age.

One is chronological. Here, public schools began somewhere near the middle of the nineteenth century (first system started in Massachusetts in 1821). Since then, the institution has adapted to many changes with varying degrees of success, probably none more challenging than desegregation with which schools are still dealing. While no one would judge the institution a beacon of light when it comes to adaptation, it still kept on functioning in relation to both the demands of the economy and to our social expectations. Some of us can remember when schools were viewed as reasonably successful – perhaps a false image to begin with but an image that perhaps gave the leaders of this institution, years ago, a false sense of invulnerability. Perhaps this level of “success” has been enough to instill an aura of invincibility among the leaders of the institution. If so, then adaptation takes on, for them, a lower level of priority. This is probably not the case now, but I do believe it was the case initially. Be that as it may, this institution today is not adapting successfully and everyone seems to know it. I feel fairly sure that most administrators of our school districts are appreciating the existential challenges they are facing as these newer changes have made themselves known.

A second way to view age is generational. That is, is its personnel turning over with the “right” types of people filling its important roles? This usually applies to leadership roles, but in terms of school, a more important personnel issue has been replacing the talented women who used to see education as that rare area of employment that society deemed acceptable for women to pursue. Of course, that all changed since the sixties and the rise of the women's lib movement. Now, all those highly talented women do what men have been able to do all along; that is, seek employment that is self-satisfying and more lucrative. And guess what? For far too many of them, teaching is not that field. And so, an internal change to the institution has been the lack of sufficiently skilled personnel to meet higher demands.

A third way to view age is the functions themselves. Here is where I believe the most challenging changes have taken place. Huntington writes:

Usually an organization is created to perform one particular function. When that function is no longer needed, the organization faces a major crisis: it either finds a new function or reconciles itself to a lingering death. An organization that has adapted itself to changes in its environment and has survived one or more changes in its principal functions is more highly institutionalized than one that has not. Functional adaptability, not functional specificity, is the true measure of a highly developed organization. Institutionalization makes the organization more than simply an instrument to achieve certain purposes.³

This passage hits on an important area of concern that affects schools. The assumption had been, back in the fifties, that schools functioned. They produced; they met their functional niche in our society. But since this demand for education is never satiated – there's always a new generation of youngsters who need to be educated – public officials were ill advised to dump new functions on this institution. And yet that's exactly what they began to do, even though evidence began to mount that indicated the institution was not meeting its initial, specific function.

And so it goes. We are watching the death of what was once a venerated institution. Our public schools are being attacked from all quarters. I even saw a clip where the in-house Fox liberal, Juan Williams, argued for choice – vouchers and charter schools. I will make a prediction: a form of public schools will survive and those schools will resemble public schools in developing countries where only the abject poor attend. These schools will literally be warehouses in which to store poor kids during the day. People with any means will send their kids to publicly subsidized schools that are run by business people, not educators. They will provide what the parents of those students want. In most cases, that is not education, but credentials. It will be only the minority of these schools that will actually educate students. We will have higher graduation rates, but we will not have more education or better citizenry.

1Moore, Ed H. (2014). Let's not endorse and enable failure: Dropping out at 16 is being sentenced to poverty. Tallahassee Democrat, February 11, p. 5.

2Huntington, S. P. (1968). Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

3Ibid., p. 15.

CRYING LESSONS

A few postings ago, I addressed the seemingly liberal tone of this blog. I tried to make a distinction that put this bias in context. I made the case that the blog is not so much liberal as it is more collectivist – as opposed to being individualist – in its treatment of governmental and political affairs, especially as they apply to civics instruction. I pointed out that since major corporations favor conservative policies and they, in turn, foster an individualist bias of their own, my concerns against the effects of corporatist policies cast many of my claims in a liberal posture: by promoting a more collectivist agenda, my arguments tend to favor what has come to be associated with liberal causes. Let me quickly make a clarifying, definitional distinction. By liberal, I mean what has come to be called liberal. In the referred-to posting I used, instead of liberal, the term progressive. In any case, I will admit my own political leaning to be liberal, but probably one that favors the center more than the extreme. I am definitely a collectivist, at least compared to what is in vogue today, but definitely not an extreme one. I am a federalist, in the more philosophic sense.

In the previous posting, to which I am referring, I claimed that there can be positions that are both conservative and collectivist. This posting is dedicated to one such position – one with which I agree. That is, we, as a society, have ignored and treated the most federalist of all unions shabbily. The family has come under severe attack and we are reaping the unfortunate consequences of such treatment. We shouldn't be surprised. With the prominence of the natural rights perspective in our political and social relations, we have found promoting the values necessary to support the family to be intrusive and, in some context, old fashioned. Yet the universal need for strong family structures is true today, is true here, as in any other time and place.

This concern for the family has been a long standing conservative position. I find their approach a bit holier than thou, but I believe they truly feel and believe in the importance of families from a practical, as well as a spiritual point of view. My interest, particularly as it relates to this posting, is on the practical. For you see, those negative consequences I alluded to above have more to do with the fate of our youngsters. All of this came to mind as I read a report by Kay S. Hymowitz.¹ The report reminded me of a time when I happened to mention to my class at Miami Beach High how single parents, especially single moms, were the head of an inordinate number of poverty ridden households. Well, that message hit a tender spot for one of my students who proceeded to take me to task. You see, I was accurate, but unintentionally, I hurt the feelings of a daughter of a single mother. Apparently, they, mother and teenaged daughter, happened to be doing just fine and she took exception to how I depicted such families. I stuttered an apology, and tried to approach the subject more sensitively.

The point is, liberals have been shy about addressing this issue. But the facts are what they are and they include the persistent high incidence of poverty and immobility, both social and financial, among families headed by single mothers. Why is this the case – it's not so bad in other advanced nations. In these other countries, they have much more generous public assistance policies, but is that it? According to Hymowitz, there's more to it than that.

As for the differences that exist between us and these other nations, single parenthood, it turns out, is quite different in the US. Let me mention some of these distinctions: in the US, young women become mothers at younger ages and they live in communities where there are higher incidents of single motherhood. This develops, unfortunately, a sort of norm for such arrangements. Offspring arrive as a result of a lack of using contraception and pregnancy encourages the coupling of young adults that have little going for them besides sexual attraction. These are people who are, for the most part, strangers and who find little to hold them together after the attraction wanes. They have a child, but that isn't enough. It seems that only about a third of such relationships survive through an offspring's fifth birthday. Then we have the following conditions: “multipartner fertility,” disaffected biological fathers – as mothers attach themselves to new partners or fathers begin families with other women – and dysfunctional stepfathers. “There's substantial research showing that stepfathers are sometimes worse than none at all.”² I might be wrong here, but this last point, I think, was the hidden message my student was communicating to me as she objected to my comments so many years ago.

What to do? First, a sober perspective of the situation is essential. We have to hold people accountable and just writing off irresponsible behavior will not do. I know we want to avoid the old days when young girls would just disappear to have out of wedlock babies. But public policy on this front cannot continue to be absent. Can government dictate dating habits? Of course not. But laws and the enforcement of them seem to be reasonable. If a person is responsible for the birth of a child, that person needs to be held, to the best of his/her ability, responsible for taking care of that child. That includes not only mothers, but biological fathers, whether they live with the child or not. And, of probably more importance, our common language should support that people be held to those responsibilities. It should shame those who shirk their responsibilities. And there seems to be hope in that regard. According to Hymowitz, there seems to be a higher level of realization that having a baby outside a meaningful relationship is not a good idea, especially if you're a teenager. As for welfare programs, we should keep them, but we should devise policies that take into account and rectify the disincentives that such government largess promotes. As Hymowitz points out, we might be providing for today's disadvantaged children at the expense of those in the future. As for this last point, I wish I could be more creative and give you a solid way to run productive welfare programs, but whatever expertise I might have lies elsewhere – in civics education.

And as for civics, the chief aim would be to bolster the more responsible language I mentioned above and with it such thinking that would lead to better decisions. This issue should have a place in a civics curriculum. The treatment should take on directly the basic idea that such dysfunctional choices, as having children outside of meaningful relations, have social as well as personal consequences. Instruction should get at the mode of thinking that has led to a certain level of indifference toward this issue. That is the line of thinking that holds we can do what we want to do as long as we don't hurt others – a la the natural rights construct. We should bring this view under severe criticism. Instruction should ask quite seriously: what constitutes hurting others; where's does the line lie between hurting someone and not hurting someone else? Does having children with an attractive person – a person for which one hardly knows or has any binding affinity – constitute moral or prudent behavior? Of course, such a message and questions ensconced in a more general curriculum that repeatedly deals with substantive moral questions would have a greater impact. No, no guarantees, but a general moral tone that encourages more responsible thinking and considerations can become one of those cultural expectations that do have a positive impact. We know that what we teach in schools has an effect. We also should know that what we don't address in school, if it relates to those predisposed desires we all share, in effect, gives related behaviors a green light.

1Hymowitz, K. S. (2014). How single motherhood hurts kids. The New York Times, February 9, Sunday Review section, p. 5.

2Ibid.