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Anybody who loves this country must be concerned about the education of its children. America’s children are its future. This three-part essay is intended as a tocsin call to caring Americans – a warning bell to alert the nation to a clear and present danger.

Part 1: A true fairy story

Not so long ago, at a small California high school, a history teacher was trying to educate his students. Some of his students refused to take their educational assignments seriously. They flunked a number of examinations and failed to turn in a number of assignments. The teacher gave the students written notice that they were in danger of flunking their history class, and he told them to get to work on their assignments and start passing their exams.

The students chose to ignore these warnings. They flunked even more tests and didn’t turn in additional assignments. At the end of the term, the teacher gave these non-performing students a grade of “F” because they failed to demonstrate even minimal subject-matter competence. And that’s when the proverbial hit the fan.

You see, the school Board, which was populated by concerned local parents, had previously approved a district policy that said any kid who got an “F” could not play sports for a whole term. But two of these non-performing students were the school’s best athletes, and everyone knew that the school team would be at a competitive disadvantage if they were barred from playing.

So, the school Board held a meeting at which incensed local parents raged at the history teacher. They told him that it wasn’t fair to give an “F” to the non-performing students. Of course, the school Board couldn’t make the teacher give a passing grade to the students, but the Board made it quite clear that it agreed with the parents’ point of view. The high school Principal, whose job depended on the good will of the school Board, echoed the same sentiments.

Now, in this situation, most teachers today would simply cave in. They would raise the “F” to a “D” and thereby join the practitioners of grade inflation. [1] But this history teacher decided to stand his ground. He refused to change the grades. The disgruntled parents were so irate that they took their complaints to the local media, which promptly began to excoriate the teacher in a very public way. [2]

In the event, the teacher refused to succumb to the unwarranted interference of the parents, but the matter might have ended very differently. If the teacher had caved in, the non-performing students would have been free to play sports, but they would not have received a meaningful educational experience.

So, what can we learn from this little fairy story? Well, to begin with, it seems clear that a good teacher can be the first line of defense against a bad education. All else being equal, it makes sense to empower good teachers to deliver good education despite unwarranted interference from parents or anyone else. But, in America today, is a good teacher free to teach? Well, not really.

Part 2: A few unpleasant realities

Public education today is a mess. To a certain extent, it has been ruined by parents whose legitimate concern for their kids has been translated into illegitimate interference with the educational process. Aiding and abetting the parents are legislators who have passed laws that disempower good educators, education elites that can't see the forest for the trees, and a judiciary that imposes its will on the educational process without regard for the realities of education.

About thirty years ago, it became fashionable to think that everyone who had an opinion about education should weigh in on the appropriate way to teach children. A thriving cottage industry grew up in our colleges and universities, an industry that ever since has been churning out doctors of education whose graduate theses elaborate experimental ideas about the best way to give children a proper education. Armed with their freshly minted credentials, this class of modern day education wizards has been stunningly successful at infiltrating its ideas into the educational fabric of our society.

Capitalizing on our country's almost compulsive preoccupation with things quantitative, these wizards have infused their experimental ideas with methodologies derived from the so-called science of statistics. Waving the banner of statistical analysis, they elaborated theories of education that fly in the face of common sense, theories that have now been widely adopted in school districts throughout the country at the expense of proven methods of educating children employed for over a century.

Ever ready to please parent-voters by trying out the newest and most politically correct solution to the age-old problem of producing an educated citizenry, and with a grateful glance in the direction of the education wizards just in case someone might need to be blamed for future failures, our legislators have mandated or approved such miracles of modern education as:

1. Learning how to read without phonics (ironically labeled "whole language" learning);

2. Learning mathematics without addition and subtraction (laughably labeled "new math");

3. Learning mainstream history through the fisheye of the historically disaffected or politically disenfranchised;

4. Learning literature by abandoning luminaries like Shakespeare in favor of "more modern" authors;

5. Dumping students into classrooms in which multiple teachers simultaneously try to teach different curriculums to multiple grades of children; [3]

6. Grouping non-English speaking students with students whose knowledge of English is essential to mastering the subject being taught; and,

7. Deserting the historically successful practice of grouping children according to their intellectual abilities so that appropriate teaching strategies and instructional tempos can be used to maximize the student learning experience.

The result of this brave-new-world approach to education has been to produce two generations of disgracefully under-educated and woefully under-performing citizens. If statistics tell a tale, it is here that they speak most persuasively. In the last thirty years, there has been a decline in literacy and intellectual achievement in our country that is nothing less than shocking. It is no coincidence that, during this same period of time, good teachers have been under continuous assault from parents, politicians and even public school administrators. [4]

By now, everyone has heard of the "law of unintended consequences." One of its corollaries may be that "no good deed goes unpunished." However cynical that sounds, it highlights an unfortunate fact about human beings: no matter how good our motives, we are capable of doing great evil when we act without giving due regard to the context in which we are acting. To paraphrase Henry James, there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood.

In the context of education, this means that policies and procedures have for thirty years been adopted in order to remedy real or perceived social deficiencies without regard to the realities of education, and in derogation of the educational methodologies that have proven successful for many generations. A notorious example from the State of California will help to illustrate this point.

Three decades ago, a few parents with a very specific and rather narrow agenda hired some like-minded lawyers to challenge the way public education was funded in California. In the 1971 case of Serrano v. Priest, they complained that insufficient money was allocated to schools in poor districts because school funding was partially tied to the property tax base of the school district's local community. [5] This resulted, they said, in a funding scheme that violated the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.

In consequence of their lawsuit, the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that resulted in California changing its entire scheme for funding public education. [6] The basis of funding was transformed into what is now known as ADA (average daily attendance). ADA, coupled with some other legislative enactments, puts administrators and teachers in the position of having to please parents in order to keep students in their schools. The removal of a student from a school by a parent represents a financial hardship for a school, and in extreme cases may actually threaten financial catastrophe.

Parents understand that if their children are to get good jobs they will need to get good grades, get a diploma, and move on to get credentialed or certificated at some post-secondary level. Because, as a rule, parents are more interested in their own children's future than they are in the future of the Republic as a whole, they will, if they are allowed, exert direct pressure on a school if their children don't receive high marks, no matter how educationally inappropriate that pressure might be.

ADA funding of public education is one of the things that allows parents to exert such pressure. Moreover, notwithstanding the good intentions surrounding the school voucher movement, if and when parents can go school shopping by way of vouchers, they may have even more power to blackmail educators into debasing the quality of education by giving good grades to students that haven't earned them, and by giving a free pass to misbehaving students who are in dire need of sound discipline. [7]

The ADA debacle thus illustrates how a few parents with apparently benign motives can, by their ill-informed actions, produce exactly the opposite result from the one they actually seek. The parents in Serrano complained that, due to lack of funding, their children were receiving an inferior education. Aided and abetted by a well-meaning but ill-considered judicial opinion, those parents have now produced an educational system in California that provides an inferior education to everyone, not just to their children. No doubt that meets the Constitutional criterion for equal protection, but it clearly does not constitute sound educational policy.

If our nation is to have any chance to reinvigorate its historical commitment to producing a civilized society, it must re-empower good educators to educate. This means that education policy must be structured to support the educators who labor day in and day out to do the educating. It means that good educators must be protected in the educational decisions they make, not made subject to the interference of parochial-minded parents, vote-seeking politicians, frightened administrators, high-minded jurists who lack educational experience, or intermeddling theorists masquerading as education wizards. [8]

Part 3: Wars are won in the will

Protecting good teachers from the decisions of educationally ill-informed people won't solve all of the problems of public education, but all else being equal it will begin to reverse the direction of the last thirty years and start to move us back toward the high road of civilization. However, all else is not equal in American education today, and good teachers are most assuredly not in control of our educational establishment.

While this country is blessed with many intelligent and experienced people willing to help educate our children, the education establishment routinely prevents them from doing so. Education professionals pay lip service to teacher excellence, but they are ready, willing and able to sacrifice good teaching on the altar of special interests and parochial agendas. While education schools churn out teachers indoctrinated in theories that don’t work, poor teachers get job protection and good teachers get penalized by an educational establishment that is better at playing the education game than it is at educating.

In anger and despair, parents are knocking down the doors of public education trying to be heard, or desperately seeking alternative ways to educate their children. In the present circumstances, it makes sense for parents to protest, and to turn to private schools, charter schools and home schooling. But alternative schooling is not a panacea for the failure of public education. [9] It needs to be part of the educational mix, but in the foreseeable future it will likely be just a tactical response to a strategic imperative. Only a universal reformation of public education will suffice to meet the strategic needs of the situation today.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are those who believe that public education in America is irretrievably broken. I pray that they are wrong. At its best, public education is the expression of our nation’s will to build a temple of learning where our children can be taught how to hold up the beacon light of freedom for the benefit of the whole world.

As we look around at what has happened to public education in America today, we are right to be shocked, outraged and alarmed. But it would be wrong to despair of a solution, for that would lead us to abandon the field of battle to fools and to knaves. If we do that, we abdicate the vision of a righteous nation that animated the founding of America, and that is too high a price to pay for the luxury of despair.

 Jed Gladstein is an attorney, author and educator

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[1] Grade inflation is a form of educational dishonesty that has reached pandemic proportions in the United States. Along with social promotion, it is one of the principal reasons for the decline of literacy and intellectual achievement in this country. Post-article note: an example of this can be seen in the Alice-in-Wonderland pedagogy of school districts that refuse to give students honest grades because it might hurt their feelings. Not surprisingly, New York City, with its social engineering government and its social welfare mentality, is in the forefront of this dishonesty.

[2] Like the local school Board, the local newspaper didn’t hesitate to throw its support to the parents, and this created a great deal of bitterness in the community and a lot of unpleasantness for the teacher.

[3] Perhaps the most notorious failure in this regard was the Disney sponsored school in Florida, which lasted for a whole three years before the parents yanked their kids out of such an unworkable environment.

[4] Parents have also been on the offensive against incompetent teachers, and that is as it should be. Also, I don't wish to imply that all administrators are complicit in the attack on good teachers. But even administrators who understand and personally oppose attacks on good educators often feel compelled to yield to the forces that threaten their personal economic survival.

[5] Wealthier communities had higher property tax bases -- especially in the days before California voters passed Proposition 13 that put the brakes on property tax increases.

[6] The Serrano case was reaffirmed by the state Supreme Court in 1976 and, along with subsequent legislative enactments, has resulted in school funding decisions being taken out of the hands of local communities whose children benefit or suffer from those decisions and put into the hands of the state legislature.

[7] This is not an argument against school vouchers, which may be a valid tactical response to the current crisis in public education. It is a cautionary warning.

[8] A recent example of the failure of these so-called education wizards to understand how to actually educate children can be found in a couple of "model" schools created by Standford University education professors.

[9] Home schooling is intellectually demanding and requires a commitment beyond what most parents can give. Private schools are too few and too varied to meet the nation’s educational demands. Charter schools are funded in the same way as public schools and are required to comply with the same state-mandated education metrics, so they often fall prey to the same subversive forces as public schools.