American education is a mess. A disaster. Yes, I’m quoting myself in a VIP piece from a few days ago. That was the start of what I expect will be a long series on how American education can be reformed, or rather, replaced — I don’t think the Education Establishment can really be easily reformed, but it can be out-competed.
The charter school, homeschooling, and universal school choice movements are part of that. It gives parents options to escape the clutches of academic education departments, teachers’ unions, and teachers’ union-dominated school boards.
God made an idiot for practice. Then He made a school board.
— Apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain
The problem is that the Education Establishment has gotten its grubby mittens on a lot of charter schools as well. Joanne Jacobs has a new blog post up about an upcoming book, “The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America,” by Steven F. Wilson. Wilson was the founder of the Ascend charter schools. In 2019, students in the Ascend schools were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests.”
That was according to Ginia Bellafonte in the New York Times. Then Wilson published an essay, “The Promise of Intellectual Joy,” in which he wrote:
For much of the 19th century, an academic education—especially contemplative or imaginative study—was depicted as morally corrupt, the indulgence of European aristocrats. In the 20th, educators sought to limit access to a liberal arts education, the education long afforded the privileged, while claiming to democratize education. Today, liberal education is under fresh attack, this time as “whiteness.” And through it all, we have accepted that for most, schooling will be drudgery: an act of discipline in service of college and career.
One of the things I urged in new schools was an attitude to encourage a “growth mindset” — in other words, the recognition that believing that you can learn something is necessary before you can learn something. A big part of the growth mindset is that the teachers have to have high expectations of the students and encourage them to believe they can meet those high expectations.
Wilson is by no means a “conservative” as we would understand one. His essay directs scorn at, among others, Dwight Eisenhower, for complaints about “eggheads” and intellectuals, which I suspect a lot of PJ Media readers would agree with. Hell, I largely agree with them.
But the “eggheads” weren’t completely wrong, either. American schools were moving away from a growth mindset with the general attitude that some students just weren’t capable of understanding and acquiring the skills that used to be considered standard.
There was a countervailing educational excellence movement that might have helped. But that had its own issues, of which probably the best example was the Common Core curriculum in mathematics. A lot of the reaction to Common Core was led by people showing one assignment that used a different algorithm, a different procedure, for some arithmetic problems. Parents looked at those assignments and said, “Hey, I don’t know how to do that either!”
At more or less the same time, the Education Department, “progressive” school boards, and politically motivated pundits were pushing anti-intellectualism of their own with the notion that traditional education was an oppressive form of “whiteness.” Wilson noted that in his “Intellectual Joy” essay — and was fired for it.
The result of turning the goals of education away from intellectual excellence to being anti-racists was dramatic—and noxious. Award-winning writing programs were dropped because the authors were white. An effective math program was replaced with one themed in social justice. Decisions were made to be more anti-racist, not to encourage student achievement. Discipline was judged racist and—surprise—collapsed.
The result, according to Wilson, was “the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024.”
Committed to “social justice,” progressive “educators turned away from the commitments that drove their success — high expectations, relentless attention to great teaching, and safe and orderly classrooms,” he argues. “New conceptions rooted in critical theory — trauma-informed pedagogy, a culture of student fragility, and racial essentialism — overtook the K-12 sector.” Students were told they were oppressed and incapable. “Outcomes nosedived.”
I think there are two lessons here for a new, refactored approach to education. The first is to once again encourage a growth mindset from the first day of kindergarten on.
But second, and probably more important, is that reformed, refactored schools have to focus on what their real objectives should be: students who graduate able to read at a high level, understand mathematics, and who are confident that they can learn anything else they need in the future.
Education is just one area of many where we need to take control away from government and return it to the people. A VIP membership helps PJ Media fund stories like this when Google and Facebook would rather we leave it to them.
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