…The article mentions that in a 1998 survey, “barely 40 percent of American teenagers could identify the three branches of government, while nearly 60 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges.”

As a follow-up to Jonathan’s point about the familiar tone that hand-wringing through the ages has taken, see Stanford ed school scholar Sam Wineburg: http://tinyurl.com/y9v4f7h
Or this, courtesy of the NYT in 1943: http://tinyurl.com/yedtsgf

Thanks for writing, Henry…

The article mentions that in a 1998 survey, “barely 40 percent of American teenagers could identify the three branches of government, while nearly 60 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges.”

An excellent program!

Do you know if any educational historians have researched the effectiveness of “old-fashioned” public schools of the 1920s to 1950s in comparison with school of the 1960s and thereafter? I wonder whether the old schools, with their harsh discipline and rote methods, outperformed current schools, or if nostalgia has cast a rosy glow over a system that didn’t work very well. Many of our kids reach middle school and even high school as functional illiterates–so everything is lost on them because they simply can’t read. I wonder if literacy rates were better under the old regime.

Dear Henry:

It’s Jonathan Zimmerman, author of \Small Wonder\ and one of the interviewees for this segment. Thanks for the thoughtful query. The short answer is that we really don’t know how kids in earlier eras \performed\ compared to today, because both the measures and the stakes of \performance\ have changed radically. Remember, it wasn’t until the 1930s that a majority of American teenagers attended high school . . . and it wasn’t until the 1950s that a majority graduated. Formal education was *not* a prerequisite for social and economic mobility, the way it is today. So millions of kids didn’t go to high school; millions of others went for a little bit, and then dropped out. Those who remained represented an elite, of sorts. Would they have outperformed high school kids today? On some measures, including math, we have scattered evidence that they would have; again, though, the comparison isn’t really fair, because we’re comparing a growing but still limited institution to a truly mass one.

And on the subject of history, which is the one I know best, there is *no* evidence that kids in in the past knew any more than they do today. Quite the contrary. In 1917 and again in 1942–both wartime years, and therefore times of national anxiety–the New York Times ran exposes about how few kids could identify the proper decade of the Civil War, or the right year of the Constitutional Convention. Sound familiar? It should.

Thanks again for the smart note!

Fondly, JZ

Jonathan Zimmerman
Professor of Education and History
New York University

Do you know if any educational historians have researched the effectiveness of “old-fashioned” public schools of the 1920s to 1950s in comparison with school of the 1960s and thereafter? I wonder whether the old schools, with their harsh discipline and rote methods, outperformed current schools, or if nostalgia has cast a rosy glow over a system that didn’t work very well. Many of our kids reach middle school and even high school as functional illiterates–so everything is lost on them because they simply can’t read. I wonder if literacy rates were better under the old regime.

That said, I’d like to see you re-visit your discussion on the cost-effectiveness of public vs. private schools.

Private schools like to boast that they get slightly higher test scores at a slightly lower cost per student. Taken by itself, that seems like an impressive accomplishment.

One of your callers voiced a common question: What are private schools doing so well? How can we replicate their effects for the rest of our kids? In response, you suggested that bureaucracy eats up a lot of public funding. That may be, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. After all, advertising and profit margins have to eat up private funding, too.

Is there, perhaps, a simpler explanation for those cost-effectiveness statistics?

Consider this. Some students need remedial classes, some need accelerated classes, some need special one-on-one help, some need extra support, or extra hand-holding, or special nutrition, or extra security guards, and so forth. As a result, it costs more to educate some students than others.

Private schools operate on a business model. They’re free to pick and choose which students to accept, so it stands to reason they’ll only take the kids who they think will give them the best test scores for the least expense.

Public schools, on the other hand, are required by law to accept almost everyone, gifted and troubled alike.

Is it really so impressive to have a cost-effective school when you’re free to cherry-pick the most cost-effective students?

Is it any wonder public school teachers have to play police officer and surrogate parent when our system keeps sending them the kids who need them to play those roles?

Is it any wonder that public schools “keep getting worse” when we keep siphoning away the kids who could have been positive role models for their troubled peers?

Would a universal voucher system mean better outcomes for everyone? Or, combined with choosy private schools, would “universal” vouchers just mean giving up on the kids who need the most help to excel–arguably, the same poor kids that public schools were created to help more than a century ago?

[...] Has school just gotten  in the way of education? Share your comments and questions! [...]

My most notable memory of school was the extravagant rhinestone matching jewelry sets she wore, especially the brooches affixed to her broad bosom. However, I did learn a lot in school. Because the teachers did not have time to harass anyone who was quiet, I spent my childhood reading during schools — usually at least a novel a day, often more. Imagine my horror when the new Jr. High School teachers actually forced us to listen in class. By age 15, I was skipping over 90 days a year, due to savage and chronic boredom. Didn’t hurt my grades a bit, either.

Well-remembered, Kathleen! I think a surprising number of us can still recall the odd sartorial choices made by our elementary school teachers… You raise some interesting questions we hope to address on the show: How much of school is day care and how much truly education? Who and what decided when a standard school year would begin and end (how did it vary regionally)? But what I’m really curious about is how you managed to get away with skipping half the school year? (Note: Don’t try it today, kids. It was different times back then…)

– Sure, skipping school is not recommended, it is often a prelude to dropping out, which I did. I never finished high school, not that McGill University ever noticed when they admitted me a couple years later.

In my classroom, I can’t imagine that a teacher from 20 years ago, much less 50 or 100 years ago would find much that was familiar. Students are expected to use primary documents to learn about history, and compare and contrast viewpoints. I must thank Ed Ayers for his site The Valley of the Shadow- that has been a great resource. My students also compare and contrast Lincoln’s statements about emancipation and colonization over time.

Students are expected to learn media literacy- especially in regards to the internet. I teach students how to search, evaluate, and cite web sources. They’re also taught how analyze media for bias. Inevitably, we wind up spending some time on logic and logical fallacies (which I guess would resemble classical education in a small way).

I also focus on teaching students how to spell and read, even though I’m secondary teacher. Rather than giving students list of words, hoping they learn to spell by memorization, I focus on teaching students the patterns in our language. It is not enough in my classroom to know how to spell a word. You must explain why it is spelled that way.

I’ll stop there. Those are the first three things that came to mind, but that doesn’t cover everything I do in my classroom. Or at least try to do. I wonder if any of those teaching strategies mentioned above would be included in a “back to basics” movement. Are my expectations for my students similar to the expectations of yesteryear? Are they harder or easier?

How has the role of schools changed in relation to changes in the role of parents and the family in a child’s life?

I was thinking about this in two ways — First, when did school start becoming the site of social service delivery? The whole child theory states that we have to help children deal with a host of issues before they are even in a physical and mental state of readiness to learn anything. This has certainly expanded the scope of what it means to educate a child.

And then on the other end of the socio-economic spectrum (which I witness often as a parent in Brookline, Mass.), is the phenomenon of the helicopter parent. Have schools had to deal with hyper-involved parents in the past?

As I teacher, I can tell you that I see two schools of thought in my profession about the role of parents. One, that teachers can never overcome (for good or bad) the family culture that students bring to school with them. That belief places almost total responsibility for the child’s behavior and success on the parent. The other paradigm reasons that teachers must separate their classroom from any negative home culture- that teachers can and should overcome any deficit in parental support. Both schools have thought have a large amount of research backing them up. Personally, I would choose whichever attitude is most useful to your particular population.

I would be interested to know how expectations for teachers have changed. Currently, pre-service teachers are expected to learn cognitive science, sociology, psychology, educational technology and a little law in addition to their subject area requirements. And that’s before they begin a near seven-year learning curve for how to actually teach. In American history, were teachers always expected to be as knowledgeable as possible? What kind of training has been required of teachers in the past? Were there different expectations for teachers in different areas?