The Voice of Democracy

Democracy spoke last week, and its message was loud and clear: America can do better. 

Make no mistake, the election was a clear rebuttal of Donald Trump and of Republicans in Congress who have tolerated his corruption, cruelty, and countless lies and have refused to insist that the costly tariffs, of which he is so fond, and his costly—and deadly—decision to attack Iran be approved by Congress. Beginning January 3rd, both the House and Senate will be led by Democrats. For the first time in decades, the majority of governors will be Democrats. 

Trump’s party collapsed on a Tuesday night on live TV. It was a rout. No party has lost so many seats in Congress and in state offices since 1958 during a serious recession. Why now? Tariffs and the unprovoked attack on Iran are major reasons, but so are Trump’s open corruption, his sending of armed ICE agents into cities to terrorize and capture illegal immigrants, his pardoning hundreds of January 6th convicted criminals, his appointing unqualified people like Pete “Testosterone” Hegseth to cabinet positions, his cozying up to right-wing dictators from Putin to Orban to Kim Jong Un, his alienating and even insulting NATO members and other allies, and more.

Another reason for the rout was Republican mid-decade redistricting in seven states. Knowing their policies were so unpopular that that they would likely lose congressional seats, they chose to cheat. Ironically, they lost most of their newly drawn “safe” districts. Most Americans dislike cheaters. 

One observer said the election “wiped out a generation of Republican leaders.” The question is how Republicans can salvage anything from the wreckage. The first step is to use their best judgment regarding legislation and not just rubber-stamp what Trump wants. The next step is to stop thinking of Democrats as enemies but as colleagues with differing opinions about how best to serve the people. Another step applies to both parties: less ideology and more practicality. If, for example, Medicare for All can be shown to provide high-quality care to everyone at lower cost, do it. The test is not what “ism” some might call it; the test is how well it works for the people. 

What should Democrats do with their new power? Hakeem Jeffries, who may become Speaker of the House, proposes to introduce four pieces of legislation in the first 100 hours after January 3rd, all having to do with affordability:

• Reinstate expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies.
• Reverse the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts included in the president’s domestic policy law.
• Move to end Trump’s tariffs and restore congressional power over trade policy.
• Direct Trump to end the war in Iran or seek authorization from Congress to continue it.

All these proposals are popular with voters and should attract bipartisan support. Beyond these, other Democratic priorities include banning stock trades by lawmakers and investigating Trump’s pay-for-pardons industry, corruption in public contracting (including no-bid contracts), bribery, extortion, and more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency going to the Trump family from anonymous sources. Other investigations will be of human rights violations by ICE and Homeland Security and the release of the Epstein files. An unqualified cabinet member or two may be impeached.

Democrats should take care not to spend too much time and energy on investigations. The priorities are to improve the lives of ordinary people by making goods and services more affordable, to begin rebuilding America’s respect in the world, and to tackle the looming dangers of climate change and AI.

Donald Trump likes to visit the Reflecting Pool and tell reporters how wonderful he is. Perhaps he should go there alone, ponder the Lincoln Memorial, and reflect on why Lincoln was a great president while Trump will never be.

                                     Ship of Fools

In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato wrote The Republic, one of the most influential books in world history. Plato explored the conditions likely to lead to effective, efficient government, what he called the Ship of State, for the benefit of the population concerned. 

Plato concluded that states should be ruled by philosopher-kings, men who devoted their lives to studying the many functions of government as well as ethics, mathematics, natural sciences, and human nature, until they were experts fit to rule. That was a tall order for anyone, so few were fit.

Athens was a limited democracy in Plato’s time, allowing free males to participate directly in making civic decisions, but not women, slaves, foreigners, or minors. Fewer than 30 percent of citizens had a vote. Democracy had some successes but some painful failures, including wartime defeat and the sentencing of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, to death by poison for practicing what we call freedom of speech. 

Plato criticizes democracy with a parable about a Ship of Fools, which imagines a vessel whose crew mutinies against their incompetent captain. The untrained crewmen each think they can navigate better than anyone else aboard, and fight among themselves, each man putting his own self-interest above the mission and even the safety of the ship. Fools, indeed. 

To Plato, the danger of democracy was in giving power to those who lacked expertise in the many facets of governing and were more interested in personal advantage than in civic welfare. With unqualified—even malicious—people elected to the helm, the ship of state is badly managed, wasting resources and endangering the survival of the state itself. Democracy prioritizes persuasion over wisdom; electoral appeal over hard-earned truths.

Given Plato’s conclusions, how is it that the democracy he criticized has become a cherished norm in the U.S. and in countries around the world? It’s because modern democracies depend on bureaucracies of unelected civil servants more than on elected officials. Civil servants are hired for their expertise in healthcare, climatology, economics, education, diplomacy, defense, and every other field for which democracies are responsible. These unelected specialists satisfy the need for expertise that was essential to Plato’s vision of effective, efficient government.

And Plato didn’t foresee that by our time, democracies are educating virtually all young people in history, civics, language and literature, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, and more, thereby laying the intellectual foundation on which universities can train the experts that make democracies work. Of course, this requires that the unelected officials hired are experts and that their advice is generally followed by the elected officials to whom they report. 

The Trump Administration has fired thousands of experts and is prone to hire unqualified people based on their “loyalty.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was a TV newsman who clearly knows little about military strategy and tactics and who fired many high-ranking officers and inspectors general. Health and Human Services chief Robert Kennedy, Jr., has no medical training and promotes dangerous falsehoods about public health. Trump sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to negotiate peace in the Middle East despite having no experience or training as a diplomat, and his chief accomplishment seems to have been to acquire billions through his Middle East contacts. 

These and other nonexperts crew our own Ship of Fools. The result of this amateur-hour government is just what Plato had seen in Athens: war gone awry, citizens persecuted for speaking their minds, and rampant corruption. Donald Trump may imagine himself a philosopher-king not needing experts because he is the chief expert in all things. If so, he is wrong. Democracy needs the best of the best in public service. Vote!

           The Kennedy Center

On November 22, 1963, I was at my part-time college job as a supplies department clerk in a large city hospital. Just after noon, I was delivering supplies to the visitors restaurant when a crowd suddenly formed around a TV listening to a report that President Kennedy had been shot during a motorcade in Dallas and had been rushed to a hospital. Soon after, CBS’s Walter Cronkite sadly announced Kennedy’s death.

A shocked nation mourned the loss of a gracious, well-educated, and eloquent president. The next day, I was in a seldom-used hospital stairwell when I saw through a window the American flag at half-staff. I paused for a few minutes and cried for the Kennedy family and for my country.

Thirty years earlier, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had proposed that a national cultural center be built in Washington. Congress debated it, but war intervened. The idea later resurfaced, and it passed and was signed in 1958 by President Eisenhower. In 1964, Congress named the new building The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Designed by internationally renowned architect Edward Durell Stone, it opened in1971 and soon became a vital part of America’s cultural life.

Now comes Donald Trump who has threatened to destroy the Center unless his name is on it. Oh, get real. Congress named it as a “living memorial” to a president who was admired not only for his leadership, democratic instincts, and cheerful sense of humor, but as a strong supporter of the arts. Kennedy was a genuine war hero who commanded a PT boat in the Pacific and saved his crew when the boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on courageous politicians.

Young Trump was a draft dodger; old Trump called those in the military who defend their country “suckers.” He insulted Navy pilot and former POW Senator John McCain for his sacrifice. Trump has no Pulitzer and never will. In his first term, he attended none of the annual Kennedy Center Honors programs. Adding his name to the Kennedy Center would be like planting a weed next to a rose. 

Donald Trump is a desperate man. His approval ratings are in the low 30s and dropping, worse than Nixon’s after Watergate and Hoover’s during the Great Depression, and are low in every separate topic from the economy and immigration to tariffs and his war on Iran. He may realize that history will not treat him kindly, so he wants to ensure his name will be immortal by branding the Kennedy Center and creating memorials to himself including the botched no-bid Reflecting Pool repair, a huge—and hugely expensive—White House ballroom, and a giant arch with drones and snipers (to shoot whom, we may wonder) next to Arlington National Cemetery. 

The major accomplishment of Trump and his Republican allies has been to add $12 trillion to our national debt largely by cutting taxes mostly on the rich. That’s bad, but Trump and Elon Musk made it worse last year by firing or buying out thousands of IRS agents including many expert auditors that Biden had assigned to work on complicated returns from corporations and the wealthy. Consequently, an estimated $750 billion was not collected from those groups in 2025—revenue the rest of us will have to cover. Total revenue was down about 30 percent.

Republican candidates in the coming election are distancing themselves from Trump. They would have avoided their dilemma if GOP senators had voted for impeachment in 2021 because of Trump’s role in the January 6th Capitol attack. The evidence was overwhelming, much of which we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears. Republicans may pay a high price for putting party before country. Vote!

                     

      Two American Revolutions

The new year brings the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of a successful political revolt against British rule. There was also a socio-economic revolution aiming to change the status of persons, change the economy including the ownership of land, and alter the role of organized religions. This revolution was only partially successful and will be the subject of a future column.

The political revolt and the war that made it succeed is well known to those who remember their U.S. history classes. In early 1776, the Continental Congress created a Continental Army and appointed George Washington commander in chief. In March, the army drove the British out of Boston, and in June, the Congress authorized Thomas Jefferson, advised by Ben Franklin and others, to write what became the Declaration of Independence. Congress deleted Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery and made a few minor changes then adopted the Declaration on July 4. It was printed and distributed in the 13 former colonies—now states—with a copy to King George III. 

The war dragged on until 1781 with each side having victories and defeats. The British chased Washington out of New York City and New Jersey in late 1776, but on Christmas night, Washington led his forces across the Delaware River and, in a surprise attack, took Trenton, N.J., killing or capturing its entire garrison. The victory encouraged patriots to join Washington’s army. (Pictured is the river crossing as depicted in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 oil-on-canvas painting now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in Germany, Leutze grew up in the U.S. then returned to Germany. He made two huge copies of the painting—12.4 feet by 21.2 feet—to inspire liberal reformers in Germany. The first was destroyed in a Bremen museum by Allied bombing during World War II.) 

In 1777, the patriots defeated and captured an entire British army at Saratoga, New York, which encouraged France to support the U.S. cause against France’s traditional enemy. A French fleet sailed to North America, and the Spanish, Dutch, and Swedes backed the U.S. The British, having no allies, found it necessary to defend their more profitable colonies in the Caribbean, India, and the Pacific. The American Revolution became a sideshow in the first global war.

In 1781, Washington trapped a British army in Yorktown, Virginia, and a British fleet sent to rescue them was defeated by the French navy in Chesapeake Bay. General Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, and Britain turned its attention elsewhere. Two years later, the Treaty of Paris ceded to the United States the land north of Florida, south of Canada, and west to the Mississippi.

And what of Native Americans whose land it had long been? Most tribes foresaw that a newly independent nation would inevitably grow westward taking their land, so they sided with the British or tried to remain neutral. Joseph Brant, of the powerful Mohawk tribe, led 400 warriors and white Loyalists on a rampage through Pennsylvania and central New York killing settlers and burning homes and crops. Washington sent to the area an army that destroyed at least 40 evacuated Iroquois villages. White settlers promptly took the land.

After the war, Washington left public service and returned to his land at Mt. Vernon, Virginia, on the Potomac River. Not a great tactical general but a superb leader of men, Washington’s honesty, hard work, and courage made him a national hero. When the Constitution created a presidency in 1789, he was the obvious choice.

For us, an obvious choice is to watch the lively new Ken Burns, Sarah Botsein, and David Schmidt six-part PBS documentary “The American Revolution” which aired on KCPT-19 in December and will repeat on January 9, 10, and 11. PBS members can stream it on PBS Passport. It’s also available as a book. 

 

         Never Forget

Hundreds of convicted criminals who attacked the U.S. Capitol and Congress on January 6, 2021, have been pardoned or their sentences commuted. These 1,300 or so rioters are now free to go where they want and do what they want. 

What the rioters wanted on January 6 was to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president-elect even though he won election by a margin of seven million votes. They failed in that but succeeded in permanently staining the history of the United States and threatening our democracy itself. Like December 7, 1941, it was “a day that will live in infamy.” 

Told by the losing candidate that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” some of the rioters were ordinary citizens who chose to join the mob and march on the Capitol but didn’t participate in attacks on the police or other violence. Found guilty by judges or juries of trespassing or other minor crimes, they received light sentences. 

Others, however, were thugs, many with weapons and criminal records: far-right extremists and neo-Nazi white supremacists. They fought the police then broke into the building and desecrated the People’s House—our House—threatening to harm members of Congress and Vice-President Pence. These thugs were convicted of major crimes ranging from assaulting officers to conspiracy to seditious conspiracy. During the attack, 174 police officers were injured, and one killed; four other officers committed suicide in the following seven months.

The week after being freed, one of the former convicts was pulled over by an Indiana Highway Patrol officer for a traffic violation, had a gun, and was shot and killed by the officer. The same week, another was arrested on a federal gun charge related to domestic violence and resisting arrest. A third rioter is on the run from Texas police because of an arrest warrant for online solicitation of a minor. Yet another freed rioter said that he plans to buy “some m*********** guns.” Great. Just what we need.

There is a scheme afoot to rewrite our history making the attackers appear to be mostly a group of patriots taking a Capitol tour. The pardons and commutations were a first step followed last week by the firing of senior FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the investigations and prosecutions—officials who were just doing the jobs assigned to them: go after the lawbreakers we all saw on TV. Members of the Congressional January 6 Committee who investigated the attack may be the next targets. 

Congressional Republicans have already “forgotten” what the mob was up to and who put them up to it. Brendon Baliou, an experienced Justice Department lawyer who recently resigned, wrote that in 2021, GOP Representative Elise Stefanik said the rioters “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Later, she labelled them “hostages” and has now been chosen our new ambassador to the U.N.; former GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler said, “the violence, the lawlessness and siege of the halls of Congress are abhorrent.” Soon, though, she shifted to calling the House investigation a “sham” and that any indictment “should be dismissed out of hand.” She has been nominated to head the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Baliou emphasized that the rest of us “must keep the horrors of Jan. 6 from being forgotten. Memorialize the day…. Keep it alive in your conversations. Doing so matters. For in a time when many politicians’ careers depend on forgetting, memory itself is an act of resistance.”

If we fail to remember, we won’t have President Lincoln’s government “of the People, by the People, and for the People” anymore. Never forget.

Capitalism for All

Imagine you have a pile of money, and you’d like to have a bigger pile. You learn that the Widget Company has invented a better widget, so you buy shares of Widget stock. The company uses the capital you’ve invested to produce the new widgets. They sell like hot cakes, so more workers are hired, profits roll in, and the value of the stock you own rises. You and the company are richer, more people have jobs, and consumers have better widgets. This is capitalism in action, and so far, so good.

Now imagine that because you’re a big investor who knows how to make a buck, you’re elected to the Widget Company board. You now have a voice in decisions including what to do with the company’s growing profits. Raise your workers’ pay? Upgrade your factory with better machinery? Buy out a competitor so your company will have more of the market? Give larger dividends to investors, including yourself? These are tough decisions, but that’s why you and the company executives make the big bucks.

What to do? You’re a capitalist, after all, so you naturally believe that investors who’ve risked their capital on the company are entitled to first dibs on the profits. They, and you, are in it for the money, so stock dividends and high share prices are top priorities. 

To keep investors happy, you think about how to increase company profits by reducing costs and/or increasing productivity. How about automation? Robots are expensive, but they’ll never want raises, never organize a union to get them (except in science fiction when robots finally become smart enough), and can work 24/7 without tiring. Automation is often a no-brainer.

Other ways to reduce costs include avoiding those tiresome government regulations that require your factory to not foul the air and water and to be a safe workplace for employees, and to avoid taxes in every legal way possible. To dodge these obligations, the company pays lobbyists and contributes to politicians who favor deregulation, restrictions on unions, and lower corporate taxes (and, not coincidentally, lower taxes on wealthy people like yourself). 

Now, forget your imaginary pile of money and consider where capitalism has taken us in this tale. It’s no longer “so far, so good.” It’s too far and too bad for workers who get last dibs on company profits and for all taxpayers who have to make up for what corporations and the rich don’t pay (and some pay no income taxes at all).

Perhaps worse in the long run, the conservative Supreme Court ruled, in 2010, that, as Mitt Romney put it, “corporations are people” entitled to make unlimited political contributions. This gives the small corporate class enormous political clout. It’s extreme capitalism—a beautiful system if you’re one of those few but a deck stacked against you if you aren’t. 

Capitalism is a great engine of prosperity, but without strict regulation and a progressive tax structure, it’s an engine with no train. People who help make the everyday economy work—nurses, truckers, teachers, builders—are left at the station. A healthy economy is a balancing act between private profits and the public good. Today, our economy is unbalanced and unhealthy.

Here’s the cure: We want wealth to flow to the many, not just to the few, so channel excessive wealth to essential public services like education, healthcare, and infrastructure. That’s how we created Social Security, public schools, Medicare, and the original G.I. Bill. It’s how we can provide affordable college/tech schools and universal healthcare. Also, ensure workers have a level playing field by protecting their right to organize and to have significant representation on corporate boards as many other rich capitalist countries do. 

The greedy will no doubt call this cure—or any cure—“socialism.” I call it having a social conscience. It’s capitalism that works for We the People.

When Schools Went Wrong

Sherlock Holmes called public schools “Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.” Americans have cherished similar hopes but have too often been disappointed, leading over the past century to a series of school reforms that shaped today’s schools—for better and for worse.

Historians trace much of the “worse” to a small red pamphlet published in 1918, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, that called for replacing, for most students, the traditional European liberal arts and sciences curriculum with seven student goals: health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character.

The reform’s purpose was to keep more youngsters in school by making it easier and more immediately practical. Academic subjects like history, biology, and algebra would remain as a parallel track for the fewer than one in ten who were college-bound. For the majority, social studies replaced history, geography, economics, and government; general science replaced biology, chemistry, and physics; and practical math and language arts covered “fundamental processes.”

The Cardinal Principles was composed by a committee of the National Education Association chaired by a manual training teacher and including administrators and a professor of education. The authors were driven by the need to assimilate millions of immigrant children, many knowing no English and with little experience of democracy, by the demand for industrial workers, by severe health and social problems including the deadliest influenza epidemic of modern times, and by fear of political unrest in the wake of the Great War. The business community applauded the emphasis on vocational training and lobbied states to adopt the new goals. Over the next decade, they became the norm in much of the country.

The shift from mastery of academic subjects to what reformers saw as meeting children’s “needs” was politically popular. Teaching kids hygiene, marketable skills, and citizenship was hard to criticize, especially when it made success in school easier. Parents liked their children succeeding, and politicians and business leaders liked that such studies made it easier—and cheaper—to train and hire teachers.

The academic community opposed the Cardinal Principles, so much so that schools of education became intellectually divorced from the universities of which they were a part. Teachers became increasingly isolated from scholarship in arts and sciences disciplines. Thousands of experienced teachers resisted the reform, and many were fired.

Making matters worse, the trauma of the Great War led America to adopt an isolationist attitude through the 1920s and 30s. Why bother with the rest of the world and its troubles when the U.S. could withdraw behind its moat of oceans and rely on its own plentiful resources? This further distanced schools from fertile centers of serious thought in Europe and elsewhere. One result that troubles us still was that many fewer students learned foreign languages.

While other countries were improving schools with added rigor and sharper focus on academic disciplines, America chose to ask less of its students and teachers. This continued through the 1950s when complaints about semi-literate graduates and the shock of Sputnik prompted a new round of reforms with increased academic content.

Cardinal Principles had some positive results, recognizing the importance of motivation and of children’s developmental stages among them. But its low expectations and short-term goals in place of deep knowledge and disciplined thinking poisoned American schools for decades. To some degree, it still does. The Sputnik reforms of the 1960s, the Nation at Risk reforms of the 80s and 90s, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common Core have all been attempts to right the wrong course our schools took after 1918. History matters.

Schools Travel a Bumpy Road

As described in the previous column, American schools were harmed for decades by low student expectations and shallow curriculum prompted by the 1918 booklet Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. Recovery began in the 1950s, thanks partly to World War II veterans who had noticed a higher level of education common in Europe and whose own expectations had been raised by G.I. Bill college study. Too, a best-selling book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, helped focus the nation’s attention on the troubled schools.

But just when a drive to enhance academic offerings was gathering steam, schools were overwhelmed by the postwar baby boom. Thousands of new schools were hurriedly built and new teachers hurriedly trained. States and school districts had all they could handle coping with expansion; academic quality took a back seat and fewer than two-thirds of students finished high school.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik I satellite shocked America. The Eisenhower administration and Congress pumped millions into upgrading curricula, classroom equipment, and teacher training, especially in math and the sciences. New textbooks were written, including a biology text so good that updated versions are still used today. History and other subjects were emphasized as part of what came to be called “Sputnik reforms.”

With The Sixties came two of the schools’ greatest successes: supporting national efforts to ensure minority rights and women’s rights. Schools came to be judged by their “holding power” and graduation rates improved significantly. As desirable careers beyond teaching, nursing, and secretarial work opened to educated women, schools did their part. When I graduated in 1961, able girls interested in healthcare were counseled into nursing; when I returned as a teacher eight years later, many were aiming to become physicians.

Ironically, these successes hurt schools. A well-intentioned desire to keep kids in school led to fragmented curriculum in the name of “relevance” and to “social promotion” regardless of learning, both of which discredited schools in the eyes of the public and especially of employers. Financially attractive career opportunities meant the loss to teaching of many of America’s brightest women who had long formed the backbone of school faculties.

Soon, falling test scores (partly due to students from deeper in the talent pool taking ACT and SAT tests) and the post-Watergate suspicion of all things government led to another wave of school criticism. A 1983 blue-ribbon commission report, A Nation at Risk, asserted "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

The authors called for a longer school year on a par with other developed nations, more academic course requirements, higher student expectations, making teaching a more attractive career, and much else. A Nation at Risk became the most influential call for reform since 1918 and led to needed improvements, though mostly the least expensive.

The No Child Left Behind law of 2001 wasn’t a “reform” as much as an effort to make schools accountable by publicizing test scores in basic skills. Funding was inadequate and one lasting effect was to focus attention on math and language skills at the expense of other learning. Relentless testing soon made it unpopular.

Now comes Common Core, a promising effort begun by nearly all state governors to raise achievement nationwide to global standards. It’s a complex project criticized by many educators for having too much input from for-profit corporations, but promising nonetheless.

Sadly, the Kansas Senate recently voted to not fund Common Core implementation. Any hint of nationwide standards offends conservative ideology, for many senators a higher priority than student learning. I suspect that if Eisenhower’s Interstates were proposed today, Kansas conservatives would object: roads, like schools, convey outside ideas and tie the state to the larger world. Risky business, no? No.

Spying on Schools

Searching for the secrets of high-achieving schools, and aware that inside information is hard to come by, journalist Amanda Ripley (Time, The Atlantic) recruited spies—American exchange students from schools in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania—who attended ordinary high schools in Finland, South Korea, and Poland, countries where students do exceptionally well on international measures of learning. The result is Ripley’s recent book The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way (Simon and Schuster, 2013).

Much writing about schooling has adult political agendas that detract from achievement issues. Ripley’s book is an exception: a secret agent story where the spies—Kim, Eric, and Tom—are normal teenagers alert to the attitudes and behaviors of their overseas classmates and refreshingly open to comparing their exchange experiences with those of their hometown schools.

Kim’s story is especially compelling. A bright girl from Oklahoma, she yearned for a bigger, more promising world. Her local school had limited curricula, low expectations, a vague focus on academics, and little encouragement from the state legislature. Three times, legislators mandated student achievement standards and tests—routine in high-achieving countries—and three times, legislators backed off at the last minute fearing criticism of poor test scores.

Kim’s school district was one of 530 in Oklahoma and, with only four schools, had ten district administrators and directors as well as principals. Ripley calls this “hyperlocal control, hardwired for inefficiency.” Costly, too.

Kim’s modern high school was not hardwired for scholarship. Its “jewel” was the basketball court, not the library or science labs. Parents were involved in booster clubs and the PTA, but in little related to academic achievement. The principal told Ripley his biggest problem was “expectations.” He said they were “too high.” Really? Half the graduates went on to Oklahoma’s public colleges, but more than half of those were placed in remedial classes.

Kim, Eric, and Tom studied overseas in 2011-2012. Through thousands of emails and phone calls as well as on-site visits, Ripley picked the brains of her spies and their friends and met with school officials and testing experts here and abroad. She found some things much the same here and there, including electronic youth culture. Schools, though, were dramatically different.

The most obvious difference, in every country, was a total focus on academic learning. Schools had no other purpose. Sports and other activities were mostly outside school, sponsored by community organizations.

The spies found less testing overseas, particularly in Finland, but the major nationwide tests were serious business. Students studied for months, and scores could determine their future learning and career opportunities. In South Korea, airports rescheduled flights to avoid jet noise near schools on test days.

Teachers in host countries were drawn from the top of the talent pool, rigorously trained (often at public expense) and influential. Teaching was a prestigious profession.

In no subject were differences as clear as in math. Math is critical as a system of logic that trains young minds to think straight, not to mention as the key to the sciences and to desirable careers. As early as third grade, American kids have easier math assignments then lose time every fall reviewing what they’ve lost over their long summer breaks. More than other subjects, math builds on what is learned before, so early weakness compounds with time.

The overseas students overwhelmingly attributed success to hard work, not to inbred talent as  Americans tend to believe.

Host schools used little technology compared to schools here. No interactive white boards, no “clickers,” often no calculators.  

The New York Times calls Ripley’s a “masterly book,” but wonders if it “can also generate the will to make changes.” It can only if concerned citizens read it and act on it.

Teachers: Glamour Everlasting

Describing Our Miss Brooks, the popular 1950s TV program starring Eve Arden as a witty, sarcastic English teacher beloved by her students, The Kansas City Star recently noted that Arden portrayed “an intelligent woman in an unglamorous profession.” I suppose glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What could be more glamorous than passing on the wonders of nature and civilization to the next generation while helping them learn to think rigorously and live well, thereby strengthening our country and helping ensure a better future?

I mention this because of the importance of improving our schools. Recent studies of successful school systems around the world confirm what we’ve known all along but haven’t acted on: that teaching in those places is viewed as a glamorous profession or, if not glamorous, certainly prestigious. In the high-achieving countries of East Asia and Europe, teachers enjoy a status similar to that of physicians and judges here. The contrast with the American tradition is sharp, and the negative impact on our children clear.

In How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, a two-year study of twenty-five systems including ten of the best, McKinsey & Company, the gold standard of global management consultants, concluded that most attempts to improve low-performing systems—restructuring, reducing class sizes, charter schools, and the like—make little or no difference. What makes a difference is teachers: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”

All the best-performing systems select teachers from the top third or higher of college students: the top 5 percent in South Korea, 10 percent in Finland, 30 percent in Singapore and others. Most do this by limiting the number of teacher-training slots and admitting only those who score well on tests of literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, and who demonstrate outstanding communications and interpersonal skills. (In Finland, only one in ten applicants is admitted.) Once selected, students receive intensive training under master teachers, often at public expense including paid internships.

Such careful selection and early rewards elevates respect for teaching and helps attract the best applicants. Top countries also sweeten the pot by paying beginning teachers roughly equal to the average of other demanding fields. In addition, top-performing systems typically have strong teacher unions with a major voice in school standards and operations.

In America, prospective teachers tend to come from the lowest third of college students. Admission standards to teacher-training programs are generally low, tuition is high, internships are short and unpaid, and beginning salaries below average. The inevitable result is the Star’s “unglamorous profession” where thousands who train to teach never do and nearly half of those who do teach leave within five years. Aside from the waste of public resources and of these graduates’ investments, the public perception—and children’s perception—is that teaching—and, therefore, learning—isn’t important; it’s seen as a job for those with few other options.

Compounding the error, politicians in some states have been cutting school resources, attacking teacher unions, and insisting that teachers be accountable for better results while paying no attention to the compelling evidence for how to get those results. We need good teachers, and we need good politicians to create a system to attract more of them.

February 3, 2012