Dropout Factories: Your Taxpayer-Supported Public Schools!

Late last night, I heard John and Jeff talking about schools that are“dropout factories.” They concluded that the responsibility for students dropping out falls on the families of those students who drop out. According to Thomas Sowell’s well-documented research in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, that may be the case among some minority families, thanks to their heritage and a black cultural bias against education.

I seriously thought about calling their show. I have been tutoring refugee students, many in public schools, for over 4 years, and sometimes I’d like to drop out! I have heard rumors about how teaching had changed for the worse, but I had no idea just how badly. To start, perhaps, I should mention that teaching is not necessarily the complement of learning, although it should be. As a teacher and tutor, I understand teaching to be the facilitation of learning. In other words, my job is to help my students learn, and that should be the goal of every teacher. I just don’t think it really is, in many cases, anymore.

Teenagers, who populate the high schools, are easily bored; every parent and teacher knows that. Why, then, does the methodology of today’s classroom seem to feature mindless, mind-numbing repetition? The worst cases I have seen come from my area, which is science. It is typical of the science teachers in the schools in my city to give students multiple worksheets covering exactly the same information. I spend hours and hours with my students filling providing the same information 2, 3, and 4 times. I am an adult, not easily bored, and yet dread comes upon me, every time a student brings me a science worksheet.

A close second place in the “dull as a door knob” category are projects. I think somebody, some where thought that a project would be an interesting way to engage students by demonstrating the relevance of the things they were learning. A good project might do that. I have yet to see a “good project!” Most projects seem to be more busy work. Here’s an example:

One of my students, a Somali girl in the U.S. for less than a year, was assigned Raisin in the Sun, a play about a black family in Chicago in the 50’s. Overlooking for the moment that this is too difficult for a first-year ESL student to read, consider the writing assignment that followed. The mother, son, his wife, and daughter in the story had conflicting ideas about how to spend a life insurance check, in order to satisfy their individual dreams for a house for the 2 mothers, a business for the son, or an education for his sister. My student is supposed to write about her dreams as if she were living in the setting of Raisin in the Sun.

Now my students have dreams, and they face difficult challenges today. What is the point of trying to pretend she lives in a by-gone era facing challenges now gone, when she has the challenges of the present in her unique situation to work out? For that matter, why should a student with just the barest comprehension of English and the most rudimentary ability to write it have to deal with an assignment she cannot really understand?

This writing project is actually one of the better ones. The worst are those that involve drawing or copying pictures from the Internet to go with math projects, as if that has anything to do with math. I should mention that it is not unusual for directions to be virtually incomprehensible, particularly ironic when they’ve been written by English teachers!

Besides numerous, repetitive worksheets and the often pointless busy-work of projects, teachers seem to think they’re promoting technology or accommodating the interests of students by giving them things to complete from the Internet. As a fairly tech-savvy adult, I have often spent hours trying to navigate worksheets because they didn’t match the corresponding web site, that in addition to the fact that the worksheet mostly repeated material from previous assignments in the textbook.

My biggest objection to all of this is how little it engages the mind and curiosity of the student or gets them actively involved in the material they are supposedly trying to learn. When I was teaching in the classroom, I read discussion about the need for homework, parental expectations, and time considerations. One of my favorite writers, Orson Scott Card, wrote about his experience, several years ago. He writes: “The thing is, kids are doing far more homework at each grade level than I ever did -- and yet they're learning far, far less. Why?” He mentions a number of factors, but the first is textbooks. I agree. I have seen more poorly written textbooks than I ever imagined might exist.

I’m not sure which is worse—writing books to promote ideology rather than competence in subject matter or writing books to make money. In my opinion, good textbooks would be classics to be updated for historical relevance and refined for quality. A good text book would wear out, and then the school would replace it with an improved version of the same book. That is not what happens today.

In a second article, he asks this telling question, “Why is my seven-year-old burdened with repetitive and meaningless tasks during her hours at home?” Here’s his answer:

(T)he reason the homework is piled on is because educators have only two strategies for dealing with their increasing incompetence at the only task that matters -- educating our children.

The first strategy is to hire more bureaucrats to run more programs that either take students out of their classrooms or require teachers to make more reports so the bureaucrats can have something to do to justify their much-higher-than-the-actual-teachers' salaries.

The second strategy is to force the children to do more meaningless busywork so that parents can see that the schools are "back to basics."

Remember that Card is talking about a seven-year-old student. So what happens to kids after they’ve endured this mindlessness for another 7 or 8 years, especially if the student isn’t an especially gifted student? It isn’t surprising to me, especially in families where education isn’t highly appreciated already, that so many students “drop out!” I just don’t reserve blame for the families; I place a significant portion of the blame on so-called educators.

I have encouraged Christian parents to find any way necessary to keep their kids out of this mess, especially when you add the “religion factor.” In this piece, authors Hunt and Carper write, “For those wanting a secular education for their children, as it currently exists in public schools, that is their choice and their right. Parents desiring a different kind of education should not have to pay twice as the price of liberty of conscience.” However, do any parents want a poor quality education for their children? According to the Johns Hopkins study, 1 in 10 schools lose 40 % or more of the students who begin as freshman by the time that class graduates. That is appalling. You can find out about your areas schools here.

This poor report adds to what we already knew, that American high school students lag behind many of their peers in other countries. Charles J. Sykes of the Hoover Institute discusses why this is. We apparently do alright with younger children (overlooking for the moment our fetish for excessive busy-work, but we lose them when they become teens, and I’ve given you some of the more obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, the public schools excel in one area. They do a great job of indoctrinating kids in their favorite secular progressive ideas—global warming, environmental extremism, anti-war rhetoric, multiculturalism, and Bush-hating; they do not prepare young people to think for themselves, perhaps the greatest American tradition and the keystone to freedom.

I thought I was original in thinking it was time to abolish public education. It turns out I wasn’t the first. Jonah Goldberg writes, “Really, what would be so terrible about government mandating that every kid has to go to school, and providing subsidies and oversight when necessary, but then getting out of the way?”

The answer, of course, is that it would be awful for anyone invested in the power of the education bureaucracy, teacher unions, and Leftists who promote their agenda in government-run schools. For the rest of us and for future citizens enduring the boring, ineffective schools that so many are leaving, it wouldn’t be terrible at all. It would be a big step toward a better future.