Sowell on education: Dogma vs. Reality parts I and II.

Dogma vs. Reality I

There have been many bitter complaints from teachers and principals about the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" act -- and more specifically about having to "teach to the test" instead of doing whatever teachers and principals want to do.

Now the results are in.

Not only have test scores in math and reading shown "solid gains" in the words of the New York Times, young black students have "significantly narrowed the gap" between themselves and white students. All this is based on official annual data from 28,000 schools across the country.
What is especially revealing is that it is the young black students who have made the largest gains while older minority students "scored as far behind whites as in previous decades."

In other words, the children whose education has taken place mostly since the No Child Left Behind act show the greatest gains, while for those whose education took place mostly under the old system, it was apparently too late to repair the damage.

Do not expect either the New York Times or the education establishment to draw these conclusions from these data. Nor are black "leaders" likely to pay much attention, since they are preoccupied with such hustles as seeking reparations for slavery.

"By their fruits ye shall know them" may be an ancient adage but results take a back seat to dogma when it comes to the education establishment. That is why there has been so little to show for all the additional billions of dollars poured into American education during the past three decades.
Ironically, there was another report issued recently, this one giving results of opinion polls among professors of education, the people who train our public school teachers. It is also very revealing as to what has been so wrong for so long in our schools.

Take something as basic as what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Should teachers be "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know"? Or should teachers "see themselves as facilitators of learning who enable their students to learn on their own"?

Ninety two percent of the professors of education said that teachers should be "facilitators" rather than engaging in what is today called "directed instruction" -- and what used to be called just plain teaching.

Dogma vs. Reality II

A recent e-mail from a dedicated teacher illustrates a problem that has received far too little attention.

In her kindergarten class was a little black girl who did well except for getting a very obvious question wrong. It turned out that the little girl had no problem with the concepts or the facts but had misinterpreted a word because it sounded like another word that she had heard used at home, where a "black English" dialect was spoken.

Since the teacher was white, she knew that she was running a risk by getting into this issue. Opening this can of worms could result in anything from being called a "racist" to an ugly confrontation at school or in court.
Nevertheless, the teacher told the girl's mother that, unless her daughter learned standard English, her education could suffer and her intelligence might be so under-estimated that she could be falsely labeled subnormal.
It was near the end of the term so there was no time to see what effect, if any, the teacher's words might have had.

Some time later, however, the mother and the teacher happened to encounter each other in a department store and discussed what had happened since their discussion.

Sure enough, the same problems had caused the little girl to do badly on tests in her next class. Fortunately, the girl's mother now remembered the teacher's warning and began to get workbooks and to watch how people spoke around the little girl at home.

On the next tests, the girl made straight A's.

Think about it: This straight-A student could have ended up a failure and perhaps even considered retarded, if her teacher had not gone out on a limb to let her mother know what was wrong. Years of letting the problem go uncorrected could have taken a toll on her prospects for a lifetime.
No matter how smart you are, you can end up looking pretty dumb if you take a test written in Chinese. But there is no excuse for English to be a foreign language to anyone growing up in the United States.

Thanks to the dedicated work of Ron Unz in California and other states, the practice of teaching Hispanic American students in Spanish under so-called "bilingual" programs, has been shot down and the test scores of Hispanic students have gone up.

For black students, getting them away from "black English" is likewise key to improving their education and all the opportunities in later life that will depend on education. Unfortunately, there are too many people with a vested interest in promoting "black English" and other fads that are part of the multicultural ideology.

What makes this a farce, as well as a tragedy, is that what is called "black English" is a dialect that originated among white people in parts of Britain centuries ago. That dialect was transferred across the Atlantic when people in those parts of Britain settled in the American South.

With more than 90 percent of the black population living in the antebellum South, this transplanted dialect became the language of American blacks. Meanwhile, that dialect died out in Britain, with the spread of education and the standardization of the English language.
It also eroded away in the South, with the spread of education among whites and blacks. But it persisted among the least educated blacks and, after the 1960s, this dialect became a badge of racial identity. Teachers were warned not to tamper with it and many heeded the warning.