Though I’m making slow and steady progress, I haven’t finished the de Kooning biography, so the follow-up to last week’s entry will have to wait. This week, two recent headlines that caught my eye: “Poor writing costs taxpayers millions” and “Students Say High Schools Let Them Down.” The first one, an AP article appearing in Businessweek a few weeks ago, came to my attention through the weekly NCTE (The National Council of Teachers of English) newsletter, which gets delivered to my inbox. It opens with this eye-catching lede:

This is according to a report just put out by the National Commission on Writing documenting the importance of writing skills in the public sector through a survey of human resource directors responsible for almost 2.7 million state government employees. The second article appeared in this past weekend’s New York Times Education section, and also opens with news from a recent large-scale survey: Although the high school students weren’t being asked about writing instruction in particular, the two stories seem to represent a tidy cause-and-effect scenario: underserved students limping through college or entering the workforce directly and wreaking havoc with their garbled syntax and illogical constructions. The dismal state of education in the U.S. is not a new tragedy, but what these reports underscore is how atomistic and mechanical a view of education our country has, and how crippling that is. Maybe that’s no surprise either, given the obsession with testing rather than teaching. (I’m willing to bet that the new SAT essay test will do little to make my job teaching college writing any easier.) In reading these headlines, then, perhaps what depresses me more than the news that bad writing is bad business, or that kids are disappointed by crappy schools is that these “duh!” conclusions are registered as “surprises” that could only be arrived at after surveys of a significant-enough number of people. Big numbers have always impressed Americans, especially when they’re measuring money. So, odds are that the education problem pitched as a fiscal problem would garner more attention (if such news gets any widespread attention at all), but the more revealing, and to me, more poignant, information comes in the Times article about the high school student survey. Here’s the reaction of the chairman of the National Governor’s Association, which conducted the survey: This surprise that students might actually crave intellectual stimulation bespeaks not just the scourge of low expectations, but a deeper ideological blindness (even from an education advocate who “has made high school reform his priority”). It’s a blindness to what high school students’ relationship with school or learning might be or could be, beyond an antagonistic one. It reveals a severely limited understanding of why students say they “hate school”—the survey reveals that “school work too hard” is not a major reason for dropping out of school, and that “the greatest percentage of those who are leaving, 36 percent, said they were "not learning anything," while 24 percent said, "I hate my school." Later in the article, we get this comment: Interesting? Again, what I find interesting is this mild surprise that the students themselves actually noticed they weren’t learning anything or being asked to learn anything. The survey reveals far more about the misconceptions about the culture of school than about the students’ experiences that it’s supposed to measure. It’s as if it has never occurred to these adults that the sullen, bored, school-hating teenagers we’re all supposed to be familiar with might be that way because they’re responding to an environment, not because they’re teenagers. Teaching where I do, I get the students who succeeded, often spectacularly, in high school, and most of them probably come in feeling their schools did do a good job preparing them for college. So, it falls on me to break it to many of them how much they have yet to learn, and how effort alone cannot earn them that “A.” The sense of betrayal can be terribly painful, and I understand, even if I don’t like it, that it’s easier for them to blame the messenger (the writing requirement is a useless burden, the writing courses all give bad—i.e. less inflated—grades to everyone just ‘cause) than to reconsider past assessments of their work and their worth. If even the “best” students are, more often than not, underprepared and underchallenged, it’s not that surprising, is it, that states are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on remedial writing instruction, “sometimes sending workers to $400-per-employee classes”? Actually, that last figure does raise an eyebrow. Maybe I need to find a new line of work. On second thought, $221 million might seem like a lot of money, $400-a-head classes might seem extravagant; but what does it cost to give a high school student a solid education for four years, and really prepare them for college, work, and life? In that light, the states are getting a real cut-rate bargain. In general, you get what you pay for.

No comments