By her public utterances, Betsy DeVos seemed
spectacularly unqualified to lead the bureaucratic enterprise called the US
Department of Education. But you really have to wonder: could she do any
worse than the exalted mandarins of educational bureaucracy who preceded her?
There is so much not right with public education these
days that it could be the poster child for institutional collapse in America.
Certainly in terms of the money spent per student, it illustrates perfectly
Joseph Tainter’s classic collapse dynamic of over-investments in
complexity with diminishing returns. Young adults are floundering in
high school, or “graduating” as functional illiterates despite the vaunted
widespread application of computer “technology.” They can do Instagram on a
cell phone, but they can’t read an application for a driver’s license. And
the mania for “diversity and multiculture” has left kids without the armature
of an American common culture to successfully mold a life onto.
That common culture, by the way, is exactly what allowed
waves of immigrants from the early 19th century until the Second
World War to find a place and thrive in an American life that was new to
them. It also enabled the sons and daughters of former slaves to enter
professions and business, even despite Jim Crow segregation. Today, according
to the official diktat of the Department of Education, and the propaganda of
the politicized teacher corps, the very mechanisms that made previous success
possible are essentially outlawed or banished beyond the pale of a functional
consensus. For instance, instruction in speaking English correctly.
I have said this before to the scorn and derision of my auditors: it
should be the primary mission of schooling to teach kids how to speak English
grammatically and intelligibly. Without that capability, they may not be able
to learn much of anything else. That this is not regarded as important
anymore is a spectacular disgrace. It also brings us to horrifying issue of
race in American schooling. (Yes, this is part of that “conversation about
race” that the professional race relations establishment calls for
incessantly but doesn’t really want to have.)
The failures of education are especially vivid among the children of the
so-called inner city — polite code for black. The school troubles of
this group may be attributed to an array of other problems, starting with a
social services system that pays teenage girls to have babies without a
father present in the house, and the inept parenting that follows in chaotic
homes. You could argue that children produced in those conditions are so
damaged by the time they get to first grade that they can’t recover.
Under Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a policy called
“racial equity” was devised to mitigate the embarrassing problem of black
students being suspended or disciplined disproportionately for behavior
problems in the classroom. The “solution” to that was to just stop enforcing
behavioral standards. The policy placed the blame for students’ disruptive
behavior on the “cultural insensitivity” of the teachers and staff, and more
generally on “white privilege.” The result, naturally, is greater chaos and
dysfunction in the classroom. It is worth reading the
piece by Katherine Kersten in City Journal on how this worked out in the
St. Paul, Minnesota, district.
Arne Duncan was also responsible for mis-applying federal “Title Nine” law
on college campuses (originally drawn up to balance funding of men’s and
women’s sports), where it was used to promote the extra-legal prosecution of
rape allegations in what amounted to campus kangaroo courts run by ideologues
unconstrained by due process. This has produced a star chamber climate of
persecution across the country, nicely in-step with the officially sanctioned
coercions of the cultural Maoists who are destroying the intellectual life of
American higher ed.
American schooling from kindergarten to post-doc has entered a phase of
epic failure under the watch of several generations of federal policy
“experts.” It suffers from several other illnesses than the ones I’ve already
mentioned, namely the tragic over-centralization of school districts into
giant schools; and the odious racketeering in loans that drives college
education. Betsy DeVos has a lot of damage to undo engineered by her
exquisitely qualified predecessors.
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