The Gates of Education

On Tuesday, an opinion piece appeared in the L.A. Times by Bill Gates, excoriating the current state of high schools. Considering that Windows needs a new patch, plug, or downloadable fix every week, I'm not so sure I'd nominate Bill Gates to be the one to fix our schools, or anything else for that matter. Still, he does bring up some valid points. The one that I agree with the most is that we are ignoring and marginalizing minority students in favor of pupils from a better "background" or socioeconomic status. This isn't fair, and certainly isn't an "American" thing to do. Our system was founded and predicated on the premise that we are equal, and that ideally, we have a meritocracy. Work as hard as you can and invest in yourself, and the sky's the limit. Of course, realistically, this isn't true. At best, we live in an oligarchy/plutocracy, that at times lately has been veering dangerously close to fascism. Often we don't get the best leaders we deserve, the smartest managers/employees, or the best possible talent for whatever endeavor, whether commercial, artistic, or what-have-you.

I also agree that we need to change the dropout rate. Once upon a time, getting an eighth-grade education was standard, and graduating from high school was a big deal. Then high school became the standard, and it was college that was the new bar for excellence. Nowadays, you can't do much with just a high school diploma, and a B.A. is rapidly becoming the minimum the way a high school diploma used to be. Now you need extra training, a master's, even a doctorate. Post-graduate studies, CEUs, CLEs, and all kinds of extra educational certification. Yet there remains a larger number than necessary of students who, for one reason or another, fail to finish high school. This adds an unnecessary strike to whatever other disadvantages might be present.

I agree with Bill that a good part of this current state of affairs can be traced back to our education system. There are quite a few things I disagree with, though.

Gates says: "...they die young because of years of poor healthcare, unsafe living conditions and violence." There isn't necessarily a correlation between lack of a high school degree and these things. Poor healthcare is in large part due to the way the current system is structured, where HMOs have the upper hand and the gummint is continually cutting back medical programs and benefits, especially for those who need it most. At at time when gaining just adequate health insurance is difficult even for college-educated white-collar workers, you know this situation isn't magically solved with a high school diploma.

As for "unsafe living conditions," I will agree having more education makes it more likely a person can obtain a job that allows them to buy a home in a decent neighborhood. Yet this problem is far more complex than the simplistic goal of obtaining a high school diploma. When corporations develop two-tier hiring programs that depress wages, as they did in the SoCal grocery strike recently, they take away the ability of the working class to achieve some modicum of a middle-class life. When corporations are allowed to outsource jobs overseas, it doesn't matter what kind of education you have: your economic opportunities decrease, and the likelihood you can't afford a decent place to live increases. When cities use eminent domain to destroy older neighborhoods and replace them with luxury lofts and condos, that doesn't really help the housing stock for lower-wage earners. When social ills overwhelm a community's ability to regulate itself, you have problems. When you have shoddy construction done with little regard to regulation or investment in safety factors, you have inadequate shelter. This isn't limited to the poor and uneducated, by the way. The recent rains here in L.A. have caused quite a few million-dollar homes to buckle in slides, simply because the appropriate geological surveys weren't done, and the necessary measures to provide a solid foundation for the home weren't taken care of. Perhaps the residents were lottery winners, but I'll safely bet these people that are now homeless have much more than a high school diploma in their educational background.

Violence. Ah, violence... an "American" value. When you have a society that allows guns of all kinds out on the streets (I don't recall too many hunters shooting Bambi's family with an AK-47, or someone needing to defend their family with bullets that can pierce the hulls of airplanes), that is okay with serial killings, gun battles, and all manner of violence on the TV set night after night, but is squeamish over anything more erotic than a chaste kiss, and racial and sexual inequality to simmer under the surface, it's pretty hard to suddenly link the lack of violence to possession of a high school diploma. Granted, there's a need to educate kids so they don't slip into these situations or vicious cycles, but it's rather simplistic to say that "they die young because of years of poor healthcare, unsafe living conditions and violence."

Another problem I have is what they are teaching in the schools today. There's way too many tests, too much drilling and rote preparation. Getting the best out of teachers and students doesn't mean training them to test well; it means getting them to THINK. Because there is so much emphasis on testing, a lot of other things get shuttled out of the way, never to be brought up. In one of my sections, I had students that did not know how to footnote a term paper properly. This shocked me: this is something I learned in 8th and 9th grades. It's a skill that should be taught at the beginning of high school, yet we have students in the tertiary system today who don't know how to do basic research. They don't attribute what they find properly, and pundits wonder why our newspapers and gummint research contains such shoddy work? Why plagiarism is rampant?

My next beef is Bill's solution. He says we should prepare all students to be ready to go to college. I disagree. As someone who was in school at least part-time without a break for 30-plus years, and as someone who has lectured in high schools and taught college courses, I can safely say that some people are not meant to go to college. I had a friend who went to college largely because of his parents; he was expected to get a college degree. Yet he took no interest in school beyond the social scene, floundered when he was capable of doing much more, and took forever to graduate. He has a college degree, but the kind of jobs he took while in college and since he graduated do not really require a college degree. I talked with him once about it, and we agreed he would have been better off going to a technical or trade school. He enjoys the outdoors, enjoys working with his hands, is quite an accomplished carpenter, and is not the kind of person who would enjoy being desk-bound. Yet he went to college because a) his parents wanted it, b) everyone else around him went, and c) it is now the "expected" thing to do.

I have talked with some of my students in the past who were drowning in my history sections. Why were they having trouble in class? What did they want to do with their time in college? More than a few indicated they'd rather be doing something else, but Mommy and Daddy had vicarious fantasies about junior becoming a doctor, or their darling little daughter becoming a lawyer, or being just like Mommy and getting a doctorate, or making a six-figure salary like Daddy. They felt trapped, stuck in a cycle perpetrated by their parents, their friends, their neighbors, their community.

I look at the kinds of jobs, past and present that have existed in our society. Some of our most noted buildings, bridges, and public works were built quickly, for a reasonable sum of money, and have withstood the test of time. Think of the Brooklyn Bridge, for example. Today similar projects go into cost overruns, are dragged out for years, and develop flaws nearly instantaneously with the completion. Example A is Boston's "Big Dig." Some of the most essential or basic jobs in the service or public sector don't necessarily require a college degree. But you have lots of people out there with B.A.'s or B.S.'s who don't really know what the hell they're doing. They don't have the training, the experience, or the know-how. What they *do* have is a sheet of paper with their name on it saying they passed a set of courses at X College or Y University.

That doesn't mean, however, that I advocate a return to the days where just a certain segment (usually middle-to-upper-class whites) were groomed for college and beyond, while everyone else is shifted into tracks as early as junior high school. But it doesn't mean I think that everyone should be rigorously prepped for college, either. Not everyone is smart enough to go to college. Not everyone wants to go to college. Not everyone SHOULD go to college. This is where I disagree with Sir Bill.

Instead, what I think should happen and be changed is that first, we do need to aim for as close to 100% high school graduation rate as possible. I think students should be free to make the choices they want; this is something that will never happen, as it involves changing the attitudes of parents as well as the community. I think where society could change its attitude is to celebrate diversity in employment. People used to be proud of the work they did, and took pride in their accomplishments. We don't seem to honor that today, unless you're a CEO who's snagged a multi-million dollar golden parachute for getting fired three years into the job. That's my new employment game plan, actually. I'll have no problem getting fired from an executive position; I just need to get hired. Then I've got it made. There is as much dignity to being a janitor, a factory worker, a maid, a nurse, a teacher as there is to being an executive, a small-business owner, a computer designer, a developer. Unfortunately, the monetary compensation doesn't always match the occupation. This needs to change. It's pretty sad when you have deans at the University of California making more than the President of the United States, or CEOs whose companies tanked walking off with millions in profits, or an overgrown adolescent in a baseball uniform making more money in six months than most people make in a lifetime.

We also lack today the apprenticeships and training programs of the past. This is where I diverge from Bill Gates. I think we need a return to the days where people had apprenticeships, where they learned their craft through established artisans and tradespeople. We need to develop, promote, and encourage programs that offer a mixture of basic liberal arts, mathematics, and the sciences with vocational training. Bill laments that not everyone is taking Algebra II. Now be honest with me: when's the last time you used Algebra II? When you did take algebra, geometry, or a similar course, did the teacher use practical applications? For example, geometry is actually very useful and people use it all the time. Parallel parking, for example, requires some knowledge of spatial geometry, as well as tons of practice. Educators and instructors should teach these courses and disciplines, but try to make it more relevant for the world we live in.

I also advocate a departure from the way high school is set up now. Most high schools are either 10-12 or 9-12, with a regular curriculum and a college-prep curriculum, with a handful of voc ed classes, like shop. There's no real preparation for anything else. What I'd like to see is a final year tacked on, but instead of educational courses, set it up so that for the year, the student has a choice of two semester-long or one year-long internship/apprenticeship. This would allow students to experiment with possible jobs and interests. It would give something back to the community. It would encourage business owners to become more involved with the educational system, with the children in their community, and possibly allow some to develop mentor-mentee relationships. It would also allow those who wish to do so the chance to start breaking ground towards an eventual job. Courses could be developed that would allow students to study, either in a classroom or independent study, more about the skills and responsibilities needed in their chosen internship.

There are other benefits too: it would allow teens an additional year to mature. Heading off to college at 17 or 18 isn't always the best option. Students who enter a bit older and a bit more mature are usually more likely to handle getting through college than younger kids. It would allow an extra year of savings for when they do go off to college (which brings me to another gripe: the cost of education. If Bill's serious about changing education and starting a dialogue, he needs to tackle how the current system is pricing all but the rich out of college).

These are just my ideas; some may be worthy, others might merely stoke discussion. There could be a huge flaw in what I'm arguing. But I think that's the biggest impact of Bill's editorial: it gets us thinking about how the gates of education are open to some and closed to others; whether our present system is working, and how it needs to be changed.