Letters to the Editor of School Choices

[...] I think that you may have fallen into the trap of believing that schools can provide an equal education for everyone. I bought Hirsch's book, The Schools We Need, convinced that the title was wrong. And repeatedly in his book he points out that students with involved parents pull relentlessly ahead. So it's really the parents we need but can't get. Schools are a poor proxy for them.

Much of what Adam Smith and Milton Friedman said about schools was based on informed and rational buying behavior. What has been neglected is the influence of misinformation (disinformation?). The Dept. of Ed., teachers unions, and even parents all believe the public schools are the best scheme. Usually that argument is based on 'fairness' but once the argument is made, best is generalized to include quality. Most parents believe that education is a serious problem in this country, but also believe that their children are receiving a good education. Everyone
wants to believe a good job is being done and so the three groups tend to tell each other that it is so.

The article, 'Do Parents Matter', New Yorker Aug. 17, 1998 concurs with research that concludes parents don't matter, that only peer groups do. I believe the correlation is there but that once again correlation and
causality have been confused. Parents CAN do a great deal to select the peer group either directly by expressing disapproval or indirectly by selecting private schools. Perhaps most parents do too little of either.

Maybe I haven't found it yet, but there seems to be little mention of what happens at ages -1 to 5 years on your site. The nutritional health and lack of drug use (in the extreme, consider fetal alcohol syndrome) can have more influence on the future health of a child than any school can. A growing body of evidence in animal models and humans documents the existence of windows of opportunity for learning various skills.
The brain is forming new neurons at 250K/sec in this age range.

Learning 2 or 3 languages is trivial. But standard school practice is
to defer learning ESL for several years after entering school and to
defer foreign languages to high school. From a biological perspective
it makes no sense. Your examples of old and new textbooks hint at the
problem: low expectation. Piaget is largely responsible for the
"developmentally appropriate" philosophy that it is harmful to young
minds to expose them to concepts before they are ready. Piaget himself
had a poor grasp of the physics behind some of the experiments he did.
Unfortunately, the theories of Piaget carry a lot of weight in the
educational community.

Public school teachers in the US are largely poorly educated. It should
not surprise anyone that their expectations of student performance are
correspondingly low. Consider Janice VanCleave, Phi Delta Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 1982. If you read her books, Chemistry for Every Kid, Physics for Every Kid, etc you'll find a great deal of misinformation. Like confusing friction and inertia (I have annotated files, if you're interested). It is hard to escape the conclusion that not only is she poorly educated, but that the people who voted her
outstanding teacher are also. With a few hundred thousand copies sold and in use in schools, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of practicing teachers have the same problem.

You wrote,

>I think that you may have fallen into the trap of believing
>that schools can provide an equal education for everyone.

Actually I argue explicitly that this is not the case in my upcoming book, "Market Education." The only school system in history that even approached equality was that of ancient Sparta (5th and 4th centuries B.C.), and it managed to do so only by adopting one of the most totalitarian sets of social and educational policies the world has ever known. I call for people to turn away from such Draconian (and usually futile) attempts at achieving absolute equality of educational outcomes, and to seek instead the best possible education for all children.

>I bought Hirsch's book, The Schools We Need, convinced
>that the title was wrong. And repeatedly in his book he points
>out that students with involved parents pull relentlessly ahead.
>So it's really the parents we need but can't get. Schools are a
>poor proxy for them.

Yes and no. As it turns out, parental involvement in education is not an independent variable. It changes based on a number of characteristics of the school system in question. Markets of competing private schools actually raise parental involvement across the board when compared to state-run systems, especially when parents are responsible for paying some or all of the tuition.

>Much of what Adam Smith and Milton Friedman said about
>schools was based on informed and rational buying behavior.

I should clarify my views on these pieces. I've included them on the website because they represent milestones in the public debate over school choice, not because I agree with their methodology. Both articles are primarily theoretical in character, with hard evidence being used only in an anecdotal, unsystematic way. My approach, to the greatest extent possible in history and the social sciences, is empirical. I've studied the way that educational services have actually been provided, rather than studying what other scholars have said about school governance. My conclusions are based on the way that real families and real educators from around the world have behaved over the past 2,500 years.

>What has been neglected is the influence of misinformation
>(disinformation?). The Dept. of Ed., teachers unions, and
>even parents all believe the public schools are the best
>scheme.

I'm going to do my best to publicize my conclusion that competitive markets are consistently superior to government-run school systems.

>Usually that argument is based on 'fairness' but once the
>argument is made, best is generalized to include quality.
>Most parents believe that education is a serious problem in
>this country, but also believe that their children are receiving a
>good education. Everyone wants to believe a good job is
>being done and so the three groups tend to tell each other
>that it is so.

I have a theory about the discrepancy between overall public sentiment towards public schooling (very negative) and parents' views of their own public schools (less negative). Basically I argue that parents have no benchmark against which to measure the effectiveness of their local schools, and that the schools like it that way.

>The article, 'Do Parents Matter', New Yorker Aug. 17, 1998
>concurs with research that concludes parents don't matter,
>that only peer groups do.

I haven't read the article, but carried to an extreme the argument is obviously untrue. If parents teach their children to read before they begin school, this has an enormous impact on their learning. Still, I don't disagree with the view that peer-group is important. Like you, however, I see peer-groups themselves as subject to outside influence, including the influence of the parents (which you mentioned) and the influence of schools. In general, public schools create less of a sense of belonging among students than private schools, and this causes students to rely more on their peers for their sense of identity and self-worth.

>Maybe I haven't found it yet, but there seems to be little
>mention of what happens at ages -1 to 5 years on your site.

I'm a generalist in a field dominated by specialists, but I'm afraid this is one area which I haven't ventured into in any great detail. It's not that I think it's unimportant, I just haven't had the time to study it in any depth.

>Public school teachers in the US are largely poorly educated.
>It should not surprise anyone that their expectations of student
>performance are correspondingly low. Consider Janice
>VanCleave, Phi Delta Outstanding Teacher of the Year in >1982. If you read her books, Chemistry for Every Kid,
>Physics for Every Kid, etc you'll find a great deal of >misinformation. Like confusing friction and inertia (I have
>annotated files, if you're interested). It is hard to escape the
>conclusion that not only is she poorly educated, but that the
>people who voted her outstanding teacher are also. With a
>few hundred thousand copies sold and in use in schools, it is
>hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of practicing teachers
>have the same problem.

You're absolutely right. The data on this are truly frightening. I look forward to a time when teachers are once again hired, promoted, and fired based on their actual mastery of their field and their ability to communicate that mastery to students. That's an eventuality unlikely to arise within our existing public school system.

Thanks for your editorial help [Mr. Meriweather has pointed out scanning (OCR) errors in the text of some excerpts on this website] and your perceptive questions and observations.

Best,
Andrew

Andrew J. Coulson
Editor, School Choices
Editor@schoolchoices.org