Fads In Education Spring Eternal

Blah, blah, blah, yadda-yadda-yadda: The presidential candidates are full of talk about how they’ll revolutionize America’s schools. Just like the candidates last time, and the time before that.

And it never amounts to a hill of beans.

This depressing truth stole over me as I sat at a symposium, trolling for a back-to-school column. It was a Brookings Institution program on fixing the schools - one of eight sessions on different topics Brookings thinks the election should focus on. Unlike some of the topics - helping Americans who are being left behind, say, or examining our role in the world - education is one everybody professes an interest in. Polls put it at the top among public concerns.

The symposium featured a new report on how well American students are learning. Not terribly well, was the answer. Reading scores are flat over the last 30 years, despite what some states are reporting based on customized tests.

There was better news with math, but get this: If America’s kids continue to improve their math performance at the rate the study found, they’ll catch up with Singapore’s students in 125 years.

Let’s face it: For the world’s richest nation to have schools this crummy is a disgrace and a shame and a scandal. Which of course is what we’ve been telling one another for a long time.

And what has being awash in an avowal of concern gotten us? A bottomless pit of educational reforms. From old math to new math to whole math, from phonics to the banishment of phonics to the restoration of phonics. Education expert Diane Ravitch has just produced a book - ”Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” - indicting the whole lot.

It hardly seems worth her breath: So much scurrying around, so little effect.

Yet education faddishness springs eternal in America, and Al Gore and George W. Bush are ready with their remedies. Gore, his official Web site tells us, “has championed efforts to pursue proven strategies for improving public education - reducing class sizes, improving standards and accountability, and bringing technology into classrooms.”

Bush, says his campaign, “will close the achievement gap, set high standards, promote character education, and ensure school safety. … Performance will be measured annually, and parents will be empowered with information and choices.”

Yes, nowadays our vow is that we’re gonna set standards and test those kids to see if they’ve met those standards, we’re gonna hold schools accountable and punish the ones that fail, we’re gonna hold teachers to the very highest professional standards … and I want to believe the next Brookings survey will show kids reading and multiplying better because of it.

But I can’t.

“Al Gore will invest an additional $115 billion over 10 years to help every child in our public schools reach high standards,” his campaign promises. This will give us good schools? We’ve invested that much in Star Wars with nothing to show for it.

I know, it’s not the feds who fund the schools. It’s the states - like Louisiana, where teachers in 1998 earned just about half what other college graduates did ($28,266 compared to $52,379) according to Education Week. Schools are only as good as their teachers - to take one rather critical piece of the problem - yet this is how we reward teaching?

It’s true that we used to get good teachers for a pittance - when talented women could do little else. Now there are other opportunities. (Not incidentally, states with the lowest salaries also have the lowest proportion of male teachers.)

The truth is, powerful interests are really not arrayed on the side of change. For one thing, 90 percent of America’s kids are in public schools. Imagine the profile of the other 10 percent - the resources they control, the positions they hold. Whatever else one thinks of vouchers, conservatives are exactly right to say the lack of choice for the poor is starkly unfair.

It’s all enough to make you agree with Lewis Lapham, in the bleak argument he made in last month’s Harper’s. The schools we now have, he writes, essentially suit us just fine: “We have one set of schools for the children of the elite, another for children less fortunately born, and why disrupt the seating arrangement with a noisy shuffling of chairs?”

Sure, the politicians will go on sounding as if they want reform, and the public will go on sounding as if they demand it.

But the evidence on the ground says otherwise.