Teaching Tuesday: Wherein I Challenge David Gelernter to a Duel

I have been itching for Teaching Tuesday so I can take Gelernter's last op-ed to pieces, spit on the remains, and smack him with the mighty folkbum glove of justice. I say, he has impugned my, I say, my honor.

He writes,

Discussions of school choice and vouchers nearly always assume that public schools are permanent parts of the American educational scene. Increasingly I wonder why. Why should there be any public schools?

Now, here, my honor has not yet been impugned. I just want to smack him because he's being an ass. If he lived at my house, discussions of school choice and vouchers would always reinforce the fact that privatization has, if not out-and-out failed in Milwaukee, at least failed more students than we know. But he continues:

I don't ask merely because the public schools are performing badly, although (as usual) they are. Pamela R. Winnick discusses science teaching in a recent issue of Weekly Standard. One survey found that a whopping 12% of graduating U.S. seniors were "proficient" in science. Global rankings place our seniors 19th among 21 surveyed countries.

There's nothing like broad generalization to set a tone. It doesn't help that he cites (I linked it for you) The Weekly Standard. The Winnick piece is an anti-textbook screed. But finding mistakes in a textbook is like finding steroids in Jose Canseco. What's insidious is Winnick's reference to two discredited, though widely cited, studies: the NAEP 2000 science study (improvements in 4th and 8th grade go ignored by Winnick and Gelernter) and the 1990's Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), the data for which has been thoroughly debunked: "For the TIMSS study, 20 public schools north of Chicago were permitted to compete as their own separate nation. This predominantly upper-middle class consortium of schools placed first internationally in science and second in math." We do pretty well in many parts of the country, and, recall, educate more students further than any other country in the world. But anyway, this is all prologue for Gelernter's real point:

Agreed: The national interest requires that all children be educated and that all taxpayers contribute. But it doesn't follow that we need public schools. We need military aircraft; all taxpayers help pay for them. Which doesn't mean that we need public aircraft companies. (Although if American airplanes ranked 19th best out of 21 contenders, the public might be moved to do something about it.) Schools aren't the same as airplane factories, but the analogy is illuminating.

What gives public schools the right to exist? After all, they are no part of the nation's constitutional framework. Neither the Constitution nor Bill of Rights requires public schools. And in one sense they are foreign to American tradition. Europeans are inspired by state institutions. Americans are apt to be inspired by private enterprise, entrepreneurship, choice.

Well, smarty pants, "In God We Trust" isn't in the Constitution, either, but I don't see you going all Madalyn Murray O’Hair on the U.S. Mint. And, jeebus forbid, we can't be like those rotten Europeans, now can we? What's it gonna be, Gelernter: Should we try to be like other countries (they must be doing something better if they rank higher), or should we be ourselves? The most grievous sin in this part, though is comparing my students to jet airplanes. They are not. They're much less shiny, for one; for another, I can't pump them out in uniform rows of matching airliners. Anyone who asks me to is, in brief, an idiot. Further idiocy:

I believe that public schools have a right to exist insofar as they express a shared public view of education. A consensus on education, at least at the level of each state and arguably of the nation, gives schools the right to call themselves public and be supported by the public. Once public schools stop speaking for the whole community, they are no different from private schools. It's not public schools' incompetence that have wrecked them. It's their non-inclusiveness.

American public schools used to speak for the broad middle ground of American life. No longer. The fault is partly but not only theirs. A hundred years ago, a national consensus existed and public schools did their best to express it. Today that consensus has fractured, and public schools have made no effort to rebuild it.

What the hell is he talking about?, you might be asking. "Broad middle ground"? "National consensus"? The mind reels: Is he offended that schools teach tolerance of gay people? Maybe he's upset that "Intelligent Design" doesn't get the same treatment as evolution? Could it be that he's bothered by our dad-gummed insistence that students have to come to school every day? Let's read on, and see if he provides insight.

To find out where things stood 100 years ago, check the celebrated 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910). "The great mass of the American people are in entire agreement as to the principles which should control public education." No one would dare say that today.

"Formal instruction in manners and morals is not often found" in American public schools, the Britannica explained, "but the discipline of the school offers the best possible training in the habits of truthfulness, honesty, obedience, regularity, punctuality and conformity to order."

The broad national agreement that made such statements possible no longer exists.

A hundred years ago? A-ha! Gelernter hates integration! Ever since we let those black and brown kids into school, the "consensus" has just fallen right apart! Let's look at what education was really like 100 years ago:

At the beginning--and even in the middle--of the century, high school diplomas were rare, indeed. Back in 1900, for instance, only 6 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school. By 1940, 25 percent of people age 25 and over had at least a high school diploma. Today, a diploma is the rule rather than the exception: 83 percent of people age 25 and over had at least a high school diploma in 1998.

The number of degrees conferred by the nation's colleges and universities now is more than 70 times higher than it was at the century's start: fewer than 30,000 were awarded in the 1899-1900 school year, compared with 2.2 mil. in 1995-1996.

Okay, okay, I suppose that calling Gelernter a racist is a bit extreme. He's probably not. I should probably just play it safe and say that he probably blames the addition of poor people and immigrants to the educational mix, as well. Never mind that in the 100 years since everyone had a pony, the US has catapulted to the top of the world in graduation rate. In the rest of the world, if you haven't proven your mettle by the time you have hair under your armpits, you're tossed from the academic track. Is that really something Gelernter thinks we should aim for? He goes on, adding that personal touch:

Americans today disagree on fundamentals--on the ethics of sexuality and the family, for example. Recently the Boston Globe described an argument at a Massachusetts kindergarten over a book for young children about "multicultural contemporary family units," including gay and lesbian ones. One 6-year-old's father arrived at school to insist on his right to withdraw his child from class on days when this book was on the program. School administrators "urged" him to leave and, when he didn't, had him arrested. (Michelle Malkin's blog pointed me to the story.) Lately there have been other similar incidents in the news.

Then there are parents like my wife and me. We sent our children to public and not private secondary school exactly so they'd become part of a broad American community. Instead, our boys have been made painfully aware nearly every day of their school lives that they are conservative and their teachers are liberal. Making parents feel like saps is one of the few activities at which today's public schools excel.

Another light bulb! Gelernter reads Michelle Malkin's blog! No wonder he's being idiotic. (In the interests of full disclosure, the Boston Globe story is here.) He also joins the anecdote parade. And yet, he still has room for a "some of my friends . . ." moment. He's the very model of inclusiveness he wishes our schools were!

I would like to know--though this is the kind of information that I would not share if I were a parent or a hack columnist--what's going on in Gelernter's kids' school that makes the liberal/ conservative divide "painful." I don't have time in my classroom to teach everything on my syllabus, let alone indoctrinate. Or is he referring to the likely presence of uncomfortable facts in what his children are learning? Take that Boston Globe story again: No one was teaching the man's child to be gay, or trying to trick him into being gay; the kid had a book called Who's In a Family?, and that book just happened to accurately portray families--including some families with same-sex parents.

Puts me in mind of that flap about "Travels With Buster." The PBS show didn't advocate homosexuality; it just said that homosexuality is. No respectable--or employable--sex education teacher is running around telling kids to have sex. But they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they pretended sex didn't exist. Just because Qu'ran flushing wasn't described in the report Newsweek mentioned in passing doesn't mean Qu'ran flushing never happened. And yet, apparently, in Gelernter's twisted mind, the only way the American public education experiment can ever be successful again is if we stop talking about things that exist, if we start pretending that things are not. Paradoxically, this is the sort of thing that will eventually have us ranking somewhere south of Zanzibar in educational quality. Let me wrap up the Gelernter, here:

Public schools used to invite students to take their places in a shared American culture. They didn't allow a left- or right-wing slant, only a pro-American slant: Their mission, after all, was to produce students who were sufficiently proud of this country to take care of it.

Today's public schools have forfeited their right to exist. Let's get rid of them. Let's do it carefully and humanely, but let's do it. Let's offer every child a choice of private schools instead.

And if this kind of talk makes public schools snap to and get serious, that's OK also. But don't hold your breath.

I could do sentence-by-sentence translation: Schools used to invite students to take their places in a shared American culture. That means the rich white youth learned the tools of culture; the poor, immigrants, and minorities learned that American culture had no place for them. Okay, that's getting tedious already. So let's just do a quick summary of the evidence, shall we?

->100 years ago, our public schools did a great job educating 6% of the rich and white in this country
->Today, we graduate more students, of all colors, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, than ever before, doing okay in apples-to-apples international comparisons
->Public schools teach students an accurate--if threatening to their reactionary parents--view of the world; facts are non-biased
->Private schools--religious schools for example--come with clear biases attached

THEREFORE, in the world of David Gelernter, the best public education system in the world has "forfeited" its right to exist, and we should pack it up in favor of every fly-by-night private school that comes along. This is an insult that will not stand. I challenge him to a duel. Clearly, not a battle of wits. But something. I work my ass off every single day educating the children that, 100 years ago, would not have been allowed in any respectable school house. I do everything that I humanly can to teach these students that, in most circumstances, would be rejected by the private schools Gelernter so admires. To say that my efforts contribute the forfeiture of these students' right to a free and comprehensive education is a personal and professional affront.

It's a shame to think, in a final irony of ironies, David Gelernter learned this kind of logic somewhere. Hm. Maybe we do need to do something drastic to our schools.