Book Review

How can the most expensive-to-operate school system in the world achieve success results that are eclipsed by other nations?

Either the other countries have smarter students, better teachers, wiser leaders and more streamlined bureaucracies; or, there is something wrong with American education.

What's going on? Let's look at the possibilities...

• Students in one country are just as smart (or dumb) as students in another country. The distribution of intelligence seems to follow a normal distribution


• Actually, the United States has better teachers who work harder and do more; teaching about 120% more hours per day than teachers in other industrialized countries


• Leadership skills for U.S. district administrators also seem to follow a normal distribution, although, there is a drain of competent leaders from U.S. schools to higher paying professions; whereas; in other industrialized countries, teachers are paid well


• Bureaucracies are bureaucracies, i.e., inept in most areas of operation except the generation of paperwork and red tape. Bureaucracies tend to force creativity, self-expression, excellence and achievement toward the mean, i.e., mediocrity


• Since "There must be something wrong with U.S. education" is the only one of "causal culprits" left standing, this hypothesis therefore is proved!

Actually, it should be easy to tell that something is amiss in U.S. education because there is a *"teacher shortage", due to the fact that so many teachers leave the profession within the first three years.

If as many firefighter recruits left the force, our cities would be smoldering cinders and smoking ash. If as many recruits left the police force, crime would be rampant in the streets. Hmm?

Actually, certain crimes (such as participation in the drug and sex trades) may be rampant in the neighborhoods surrounding the lowest performing schools. But, correlation does not prove a "cause and effect" relationship.

The Books' Topics:

• Progressive Educational Thinking


• The Cult of the Child


• Education after Behavioralism


• Pedagogue-Centric Education: The Omnipotent/ Incompetent Teacher


• The Irrelevant Student


• "Textbook Garbage."


• Where Education Succeeds: The Absence of the Progressive Paradigm in Japan

The central themes of this book are:

• Faulty assumptions about what education is and how important teachers are to students' learning causes teachers to be mistakenly blamed for failures in the American educational system


• Fixing our educational system means changing the role of the teacher to something that is realistic, and making students responsible for their own learning


• The history of how U.S. educators came to believe in the failed notions about what constitutes quality instruction is important in devising a cure


• U.S. Education will continue to lag behind other developed nations until students are required to work harder and develop the self-discipline that is required for achievement

Keywords:

• Progressive Paradigm


• Behaviorism and Individualism


• Cult of the Child


• Pedagogue-Centric Education


• Textbook Garbage

Main Idea:

U.S. education would improve if students (instead of their teachers) were accountable for their own learning success

The Japanese Model of education produces better results because students and their parents are driven to excel.

A national curriculum and a national system of testing could reverse the downward slide in instructional success, a slide that cannot be stopped by just throwing more money at the problem.

Quotes:

"There is no shortage of comment from intelligent and not so intelligent people arguing that better, smarter teachers will produce better, smarter students, and that culpability for the low levels of academic achievement among our teachers undoubtedly lies with our teachers." (p. - x)

"This grossly simplistic and mechanistic view of learning—that teachers determine whether or not students learn—is quite simply, wrong." (p. - xi)

"In a way, Parker [Col. Francis W. Parker] created the mold for the modern superintendent—highly paid (despite his less than stellar educational background) and imperious to his often better-educated subordinates in the classroom, all the while professing a great love for children—but from a safe distance." (p. - 79)

"...By one current, behaviorism, the teacher's responsibility is to provide the appropriate stimulus that will elicit from each student the desired response; the student is seen in a relatively passive and helpless role, his action determined by the demands of the environment and the stimuli provided by the teacher, who is all-powerful because of his training in pedagogical science.
By another current, based on the theories of Dewey and Kilpatrick, students are expected to learn only what they feel a need to learn. Because compelling students to learn something they feel no need for might inflict on them grave psychological damage, all subject must be learned in a natural way, through normal interactions and relations with one's environment, society, and peers, in the absence of compulsion, strain, and formal lessons on academic subjects." (p. - 148 & 149)

"Teachers, after all, are trained professionals in pedagogy, a scientific discipline, with the power—if they try hard enough, if they care enough, if they are not cynical, burned-out, public functionaries, protected in their incompetence by the teachers' unions, and if they will merely implement the latest pedagogical techniques devised by the experts in the colleges of education, acting as impartial, scientific rigor—to make learning natural and easy, even fun for students." (p. - 149)

"It is time for Americans to consider the possibility that the problem of underachievement in the nations's public schools does not stem from the teachers and how they teach, but rather from elements of the Progressive Paradigm that make widespread academic excellence virtually impossible to achieve. It is time to consider the possibility that the chief beneficiaries of this pedagogue-centric educational philosophy are not the students but only the colleges of education and the people in them who promote the Progressive Paradigm " (p. - 150)

"Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education. That being the accepted wisdom, students are free to do nothing more than wait for the teacher to create success for them. Educational reform literature rarely contains the thought that our students are failing primarily because they do not study enough." (p. - 150)

"...Many students in the United States frequently fail to learn even when they have a good teacher, one reason being that they are not expected to engage in the struggle that is sometimes—even often—necessary for gaining knowledge, and therefore don't strive for understanding." (p. - 153)

"It is an ugly and disgraceful fact that the current system of letter grades, in the absence of an absolute, objective standard, is grossly unfair...The current system of letter grades penalizes students who choose difficult courses with demanding teachers, for such students are more likely to earn lower grades than students who choose electives taught by "cool" teachers who don't expect their students to sweat and struggle to meet high standards...The current system, because of the "Lake Wobegon Effect" (the term that describes how most students in U.S. schools are above average), also gives mediocre students good grades they don't deserve, and thus a false sense of competence "(p. - 199 - 200)

"...the letter grade system penalizes demanding teachers, for teachers who have high expectations for their students and insist that they work hard for good grades when students in Mr. So-and-so's class have such an easy time--they all get A's and never have to study! The tough teachers in American schools must often waste an inordinate amount of time and energy defending their adherence to high standards; eventually, many simply loose their idealism and give up, having grown weary of incessant complaints from students, parents, and even administrators."(p. - 200)

"Students must understand that going to school is their job, something that most do not now realize. Many students, thinking that it is the teachers job to do what will "make" them smart, feel little need to take their classes seriously."; (p. - 200)

"The knee-jerk tendency in the United States is to charge teachers with incompetence for any perceived failure of their students or their schools. Considering what teachers are expected to do—make students smart without causing them stress, and make their time at school a joyful, emotionally fulfilling experience—teachers cannot but fail and thus incur society's contempt. Placing responsibility for learning on the students, and expecting teachers only to present competent lessons..., might retain many of the large percentage of teachers who leave within the first three years, and might reduce the burnout factor among veterans." (p. - 201)

Issues Addressed by the Book:

U.S. students (and their parents) expect that their teachers will motivate them, entertain them, devise novel methods to communicate information and instill knowledge...while the students remain in a passive learning mode.

Descriptions of the Japanese method of education are so "out of sync"to American culture that almost no one would suggest that such a stressful method be adopted in the U.S. (Although the odious testing required by the No Child Left Behind Act is a baby step in this direction.

The Book's Shortcomings:

The book is meticulously academic, and few teachers have time to read such a long book, cover to cover. The writing style uses long sentences with qualifiers, but teachers need quick, scanable text.

The history of how U.S. education became mired "in the state that it is in" is important, because "what caused the mess" is important in arriving at a solution to the real problem. However, working-day-and-night teachers need a resource that easily maps to action plans and how-to checklists. That is why Chapter 8, "What is to Be Done?" Pages 196 to 202, are the most important part of the book.

Teachers can always read about the history, later.

Comments:

It is easy to assume that the teacher shortage is due to the relatively low pay and long hours that teachers face.

It is also easy to point the finger at the No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) to find a major source of the inordinate stress that teachers and students are experiencing as the law warps sound instructional design, values and ideals.

But, it is harder to recognize the basic social assumptions that underpin our schools' culture of failure.

The comparisons with Japanese and Asian educational systems, while fascinating, do not provide workable, doable maps of what to change in U.S. education. The attitudes and assumptions needed to adopt a Japanese-model educational system as so different from what Americans value that believing that such a system would work here creates a level of "cognitive dissonance."

It might almost be easier to get Americans to adopt an "Eskimo diet" of raw seal blubber than to implement the Japanese educational model in the U.S.

Summary:

Doomed to Fail offers lots of insights and lots of eloquent passages that paint elegant pictures detailing the reasons that our schools continue to under deliver for our students.

And, Doomed to Fail explains the reasons why our current reform efforts can only fail because they are based upon false assumptions.

The language of the book is so well crafted that it would have been easy to provide double or triple the number of quotes in this review. This is an excellent book.

Rating (Four Point scale):