Missing the Point

I don’t think that Joel Kotkin actually comprehends the enormity of the problem we are facing in education today. In his piece at UnHerd, after listing some of the shortcomings in Illinois’s public school systems (Illinois is always a good example of a bad example) he remarks:

It is no surprise, then, that the education system fails to produce the workers needed by employers. The latter, in particular, note a lack of “soft skills” in young workers, such as the ability to think critically, as well their “unrealistic” expectations about work. Even as business schools, particularly elite ones, push such themes as critical race theory, roughly half of all major corporations are now eliminating college degrees as a perquisite for hiring.

“When you hear these things,” Arizona State professor Paul Carrese tells me, “you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Yet, despite all this, he also suggests that “we are at the end of a downward spiral”, where “loss of confidence in education has become a wake-up call”.

To name just a few things the Chicago Public Schools have clearly demonstrated do not improve outcomes:

Low student to teacher ratios

The present student to teacher ratio in the CPS is 14:1. That’s the lowest it has been for years. Lowering the ratio has not resulted in improved outcomes. Note that the student to teacher ratio does not include the substantial number of administrators employed by the district.

High per pupil spending

The spending per student in the CPS is roughly $17,000. That’s considerably higher than in any adjoining state, more than Los Angeles Unified and almost twice as much as in Texas.

A union-organized labor force

The Chicago Teachers Union is basically running the City of Chicago at this point. It has been on strike twice in the last five years.

A large district

The CPS is the third-largest school district in the United States. Whatever economies there are to scale in K-12 education they are not reflected in outcomes.

You can’t even urge a “back to basics” approach to education because there is no consensus on what the basics are anymore. When John Dewey laid the foundation for today’s public schools more than a century ago he had a very clear objective for the public schools: acculturation. Detach the students from the cultures of their parents’ countries of origin and inculcate in them the ideas and values of the United States. Such a strategy would be castigated as racist, genderist, and ableist today.

At this point about 25% of students in K-12 public schools do not speak English at home. I don’t have good statistics on this but many of their parents are functionally illiterate in English and, probably, in their native languages. That itself is an impediment to learning.

Finally, as I have been pointing out for some time, in our post-literate society the “soft skills” to which Mr. Kotkin refers are practically impossible to teach. They are the products of a literate society not a visual one our present society.