Public Education is failing our children

The truth? You can't handle the truth

School bus? We don’t need no stinking school bus.

This column goes out to my oldest friend, Mary Rutledge (nee Himschoot), whom I’ve known for sixty years. Because we were seated alphabetically in elementary school, she and I sat close to each other for years. We also shared a long bus ride home. My wife, kids, and I have had the opportunity to visit her in Florida several times over the years. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Two things end up being generally true when you turn 66: The first is that you’ve been a licensed driver for 50 years. The second is that you most likely entered first grade sixty years ago. In my case, this took place in Fort Myers, FL, in 1962. The school was St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic parochial school.

For me, this was an early break. St. Francis was an academically excellent school. I have little doubt that I would be where I am now were it not for the high-quality education I received there for my first six years in school.

During the 1960s, American schools had a clear mandate to prepare the next generation of Americans for careers in science, engineering, medicine, and other professions. School work was rigorous, and your parents would hear about it if you slacked off. High marks were dearly earned. And if I came home with anything less than a “B” on a report card, it meant trouble.

My elementary education played out against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race. Most of the country was united around the concept that, in order for our country to excel, we had to move away from a workforce that was largely tooled for agrarian and trade jobs to a more robust professional class. Farming and trade careers were still important, but we needed more scientists and engineers to get us to the moon (and beyond) before the Soviet Union. We needed people to build and program computers. We needed people capable of designing supersonic airliners.

My fifth-grade science project was typing the blood of everyone else in my class who’d consented to being tested. I had a sponsor at the Lee County Health Department who arranged for a nurse to come with me to school the day we collected samples. My sponsor walked me through the typing process in the local lab. A few days later, everyone in my class had a report on their blood type. Others built intricate scale models of bridges and wind tunnels. One classmate used the school yard as a launch pad for a massively detailed Saturn V rocket topped with an Apollo capsule.

I belabor these accomplishments to make a point. When my oldest son was in the fifth grade in 2013, what passed for his school science project was the equivalent of finger painting. I’m reasonably sure that no one in his class even knew what a blood type meant, much less how to obtain one. The math and science problems that he had for homework during his fifth grade year were an embarrassment.

There is no study of which I am aware that shows anything other than disastrous outcomes for students in contemporary American public schools. The news is almost uniformly bad. We rank, depending on the study, near the back of the first world in educational outcomes and often in the middle of the developing world. Throwing more money at the public education problem has done nothing to ameliorate poor outcomes.

When I was an older, non-traditional student in college studying physics and math (circa 1990), I took a graduate-level math class from a Japanese instructor who had a reputation for being tough and difficult. I generally liked tough instructors because high standards generally meant that you were likely to get a lot out of the course. The first day of class, he walked into the room and opened with a come-to-Jesus monologue about how unprepared American students were for advanced math. “I learned what you will attempt to learn here in high school,” he declaimed.

He then addressed a long list of what he believed to be American technological embarrassments, including space shuttles, automobiles, and electronics, all of which he blamed on a poor educational system. When he was finished, he asked if there were any questions before he went on. I raised my hand and asked him what he thought of our atom bombs.

Everyone in the room stopped breathing. You could have heard a pin drop. After a few seconds, he turned around and started lecturing about partial differential equations. Later, as we were all walking out of the room at the end of class, he stopped me and asked if I would come to his office.

When we reached his office, he asked me to remove my shoes and proceeded to treat me to a Japanese tea ceremony. He laughed and told me that he’d been delivering that same call-down for years and that I was the first person ever to push back, and he then told me something that I will never forget. “To excel, you must be unafraid.”

I went on to earn a “B+” in his class (there were no "As"). It was the hardest “B” that I ever earned—and the most satisfying. Sweat equity matters.

You can carry on all that you want about woke indoctrination and other craziness in public schools, and I’ll agree with you that a lot of it is, indeed, counterproductive to the cause of a good education. You can complain about the overemphasis on college preparation in K–12 education, and I’ll emphatically agree with you on that. And you can rail against the glut of school administrators and intractable teacher unions, and I’ll disagree with you on none of it. But, at least in my opinion, you still haven’t gotten to the root of the issue with failing schools in America: we are afraid to excel.

In today’s university setting, my hard-nosed math professor would lose his job over such a “demeaning” monologue, true or not, and I’d likely be kicked out of school for racial insensitivity for my response. One of the most brilliant physicists of my lifetime, Richard Feynman, would, were he still alive, be unable to hold a tenured position in most any American college or university. He’d be far too controversial.

The operating phrase in education today, from K–12, is entitlement. Students are entitled to pass through the system whether they accomplish anything or not. If little Johnny doesn’t get algebra, it cannot possibly be his fault. A dozen additional administrators and a sizable amount of tax money are required to address the systemic failure that’s put Johnny behind the 8-ball due to no fault of his own.

Johnny’s failure can’t possibly be because he sleeps through class on the days that he bothers to show up or that he doesn’t even know what homework is; it has to be something external to Johnny’s locus of control. That’s because almost no one, from the district superintendent to the classroom teacher, has the wherewithal or guts to look Johnny in the eye and tell him to get off of his butt and get to work. No one is willing to hold Johnny or Johnny’s family accountable for Johnny’s progress.

And for good reason, as that would probably mark the beginning of any educator’s next job.

We made the decision to homeschool our two youngest until we could get them into the high-standard charter school that we wanted. I have become a big proponent of school choice. Let parents look at the outcomes of various schools and choose the one that works best for them. It can’t be worse than what we have now.

Right now, public schools have essentially no competition, which allows them to pretend that all learning issues are the fault of their stars and not themselves. A lack of competition has led to an utter lack of accountability in education, all the way from kindergarten through higher education. Since bracing students and parents about behavior and study habits is difficult, schools focus on bogus issues, like the unfairness of difficult topics, standardized exams, and homework, as a smokescreen for their own cowardice and ineptitude.

It’s now been the better part of a decade since I taught my last class as a lecturer in physics. In my final years, it occurred to me that we were developing a de facto binary system of haves and have-nots in education. About 20% of my students were wonderful—both competent and hard-working. They were going to be just fine. Most of the rest were, in educational terms, lost souls wandering the face of the earth for whom the prospects of ever paying off student loans through gainful employment were less than great.

Nearly all of these students were the product of a failed system of K–12 education: a system that seems more concerned, in some cases, with allowing students to undergo social gender transition without their parents knowledge than teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Most public schools have lost their way. Even if they do a good job of staying out of culture wars, their standards for advancement are sufficiently low as to be useless. Show up for the minimum number of days, do the minimum amount of work, and get passed on as someone else’s problem. That’s the lay of the land.

One of the most disheartening and colossal recent failures of public schools occurred during the COVID pandemic, when many students were forced into remote learning despite a paucity of evidence in support of this approach. Teacher unions and the federal government played no small role in perpetuating this disaster. If there is a hell, I doubt that it’s hot enough for the people who championed these terrible policies.

From middle school on, many kids are a complex bundle of emotion, hormones, and rebellion trying to find their way. In addition to failing students academically with lockouts, schools failed them developmentally as well. It’s no small wonder that learning outcomes, already low, are now even more dismal.

It’s no wonder that gender confusion, which previously affected far less than one percent of the population, has reached near epidemic status in the past few years. You might be confused too if your world had been yanked from beneath your feet the way that it was from school kids in the middle of lengthy school shutdowns.

As for what to do about all of this, I’m out of moves. My approach of tough love simply won’t fly in today’s world.

I obtained a teaching certificate years ago for the purpose of teaching high school physics and math if I couldn’t land a job in higher education. Even then, decades ago, I was dismayed at how low the standards were at the college where I studied education. The seeds for our current mess were being planted then: rejection of standardized exams, rejection of objectivity in social and natural sciences, eschewing personal responsibility, advocating for divisive causes over educational basics, clamoring for a lower bar in the interests of “fairness.”

During my short time in education, I briefly took an optional course in educational psychology. On the first day of class, the professor asked us to write an extemporaneous essay on how we’d improve K–12 education if we could just wave a magic wand to make it happen. I wrote the essay in class in about 30 minutes and turned it in. It was, I assure you, nothing special.

The next day, I found myself with the professor in the Dean’s office, defending myself against a charge of plagiarism based on my extemporaneous essay written in class. In a Lucky Hank moment, they told me, “We don’t know how you did it, but no student writes like this at this school.” I asked for another topic of their choosing to write about while they watched. After five minutes of looking over my shoulder, they apologized. “Please don’t take this the wrong way.” “We could use more students like you.”

I walked out of the Dean’s office and straight over to the registrar’s office to drop the class.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth