Inside American Education: Thomas Sowell: 9780029303306: Amazon.com: Books
CHAPTER 2--Impaired Faculties
"INTELLECTUAL LEVELS
…Consistently, for decades, those college
students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of
all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the
least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university.
The word “contempt” appears repeatedly in discussions of the
way most academic students and professors view their counterparts in the field
of education.6
At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be
“the widest street in the world” because it separates that institution from the
rest of Columbia University.
Nor is Columbia at all unique in this respect.
“In many universities,” according to a study by Martin
Mayer, “there is little it any contact between the members of the department of
education and the members of other departments in the school.”7
When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he
told the institution’s overseers that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education
was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.”8
More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, “the
educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least
amount of hard work.”9
Education schools and education departments have been called
“the intellectual slums” of the university.
Despite some attempts to depict such attitudes as mere
snobbery, hard
data on education student qualifications have consistently shown their mental
test scores to be at or near the bottom among all categories of students.
This was as true of studies done in the 1920s and 1930s as
of studies in the 1980s.10
Whether measured by Scholastic Aptitude Tests, ACT tests,
vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, or Graduate Record Examinations,
students
majoring in education have consistently scored below the national average.11
When the U.S. Army had college students tested in 1951 for
draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students passed in
the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and
mathematics, but only 27 percent of those majoring in education passed.12
In 1980-81, students majoring in education scored lower on
both verbal and quantitative SATs than students majoring in art, music,
theatre, the behavioral sciences, physical sciences, or biological sciences,
business or commerce, engineering, mathematics, the humanities, or health
occupations.
Undergraduate business and commercial majors have long been
regarded as being of low quality, but they still edged out education majors on
both parts of the SAT.
Engineering students tend to be lopsidedly better
mathematically than verbally, but nevertheless their verbal scores exceeded
those of education majors, just as art and theatre majors had higher
mathematics scores than education majors.
Not only have education students’ test scores been low, they
have also been declining over time.
As of academic year 1972-73, the average verbal SAT score
for high school students choosing education as their intended college major was
418—and by academic year 1979-80, this had declined to 389.13
At the graduate level, it is very much the same story, with
students in numerous other fields outscoring education students on the Graduate
Record Examination—by from 91 points composite to 259 points, depending on the
field.14
The pool of graduate students in education applies not only
teachers, counselors, and administrators, but also professors of education and
other “leaders” and spokesmen for the education establishment.
In short, educators are drawing
disproportionately from the dregs of the college-educated population.
As William H. Whyte said back in the 1950s, “the facts are
too critical for euphemism.”15
Professors of education rank as low
among college and university faculty members as education students do among
other students.
After listing a number of professors “of great personal and
intellectual distinction” teaching in the field of education, Martin Mayer nevertheless
concluded:
On the average, however, it is true to say that the academic
professors, with many exceptions in the applied sciences and some in the social
sciences, are educated men, and the professors of
education are not.16
Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it
can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that “most education
courses are not intellectually respectable, because their teachers and the
textbooks are not intellectually respectable.”17
In short, some of the least
qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest
quality courses supply most American public school teachers.
There are severe limits to how intellectual their teaching
could be, even if they wanted it to be.
Their susceptibility to fads, and especially to
non-intellectual and anti-intellectual fads, is understandable—but very
damaging to American education.
What is less understandable is why
parents and the public allow themselves to be intimidated by such educators’
pretensions of “expertise.”
The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching
profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep
out all those who refuse to take education courses.
These courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they
keep out the competent.
It is Darwinism stood on its head,
with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers.
The weeding out process begins early and continues long, eliminating
more and more of the best qualified people.
·
Among high school seniors, only 7 percent of those with SAT
scores in the top 20 percent, and 13 percent of those in the next quintile,
expressed a desire to go into teaching, while nearly half of those in the
bottom 40 percent chose teaching.
·
Moreover, with the passage of time, completion of a college
education, and actual work in a teaching career, attrition is far higher in the
top ability groups—85 percent of those in the top 20 percent leave teaching
after relatively brief careers—while low-ability people tend to remain
teachers.18
This too is a long-standing pattern.
A 1959 study of World War II veterans who had entered the
teaching profession concluded that “those who are academically more capable and
talented tended to drop out of teaching and those who remained as classroom
teachers in the elementary and secondary schools were the less intellectually
able members of the original group.”19
The results in this male sample were very similar to the
results in a female sample in 1964 which found that the “attrition rate from
teaching as an occupation was highest among the high ability group.”20
Other studies have had very similar results.21
Sometimes the more able people simply leave for greener
pastures, but the greater seniority of the least able can also force schools to
lay off the newer and better teachers whenever jobs are reduced.
The dry statistics of these studies translate into a painful
human reality captured by a parent’s letter:
Over the years, as a parent, I have repeatedly felt
frustrated, angry and helpless when each spring teachers—who were the ones the
students hoped anxiously to get, who had students visiting their classrooms
after school, who had lively looking classrooms—would receive their lay-off
notices. Meanwhile, left behind to teach our children, would be the mediocre
teachers who appeared to have precious little creative inspiration for teaching
and very little interest in children.22
With teachers as with their students, merely throwing more
money at the educational establishment means having more expensive
incompetents.
Ordinarily, more money attracts better people, but the
protective barriers of the teaching profession keep out better-qualified
people, who are the least likely to have wasted their time in college on
education courses, and the least likely to undergo a long ordeal of such Mickey
Mouse courses later on.
Nor is it realistic to expect reforms by existing education
schools or to expect teachers’ unions to remedy the situation.
As a well-known Brookings Institution study put it,
“existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the
problem.”23
Teachers’ unions do not represent teachers in the abstract.
They represent such teachers as actually exist in today’s
public schools.
These teachers have every reason to fear the competition of
other college graduates for jobs, to fear any weakening of iron-clad tenure
rules, and to fear any form of competition between schools that would allow
parents to choose where to send their children to school.
Competition means winners and losers—based on performance,
rather than seniority or credentials.
Professors of education are even more vulnerable, because
they are supplying a product widely held in disrepute, even by many of those
who enroll in their courses, and a product whose demand is due almost solely to
laws and policies which compel individuals to enroll, in order to gain tenure
and receive pay raises.
As for the value of education courses and degrees in the
actual teaching of school children, there is no persuasive evidence that such
studies have any pay-off whatever in the classroom.
Postgraduate degree holders became much more common among
teachers during the period of declining student test scores.
Back in the early 1960s, when student SAT scores peaked,
fewer than one-fourth of all public school teachers had postgraduate degrees
and almost 15 percent lacked even a Bachelor’s degree.
But by 1981, when the test score decline hit bottom, just
over half of all teachers had Master’s degrees and less than one percent lacked
a Bachelor’s.24
Despite the questionable value of education courses and
degrees as a means of improving teaching, and their role as barriers keeping
out competition, defenders of the education schools have referred to proposals
to reduce or eliminate such requirements as “dilutions” of teacher quality.25
Conversely, to require additional years of education courses
is equated with a move “to improve standards for teachers.”26
Such Orwellian Newspeak turns reality upside down, defying
all evidence.
It should not be surprising that
education degrees produce no demonstrable benefit to teaching.
The shallow and stultifying courses behind such degrees are
one obvious reason.
However, even when the education school curriculum is
“beefed up” with more intellectually challenging courses at some elite
institutions, those challenging courses are likely to be in subjects imported
from other disciplines—statistics or economics, for example—rather than courses on how to teach children.
Moreover, such substantive courses are more likely to be
useful for research purposes than for actual classroom teaching.
When Stanford University’s school of education added an
honors program, it was specifically stated that this
was not a program designed for people who intended to become classroom
teachers.27
The whole history of schools and departments of education
has been one of desperate, but largely futile, attempts to gain the respect of
other academics—usually by becoming theoretical and research-oriented, rather
than by improving the classroom skills of teachers.28
But both theoretical and practical
work in education are inherently limited by the low intellectual level of the
students and professors attracted to this field.
Where education degrees are not mandated by law as a
requirement for teaching in private schools, those schools themselves often
operate without any such requirement of their own.
The net result is that they can draw upon a much wider pool
of better-educated people for their teachers.
The fact that these private schools often pay salaries not
as high as those paid to public school teachers further reveals the true role
of education degrees as protective tariffs, which allow teachers’ unions to
charge higher pay for their members, who are insulated from competition.
Schools and departments of education thus serve the narrow
financial interests of public school teachers and professors of education—and
disserve the educational interests of more than 40 million American school
children."
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