Last week, President Obama seemed surprised that some public school students attend classes in trailers.
I can remember taking several classes in trailers 25 years ago. This is hardly a new development, or one that should matter all that much.
The obsession with “state-of-the-art” facilities misses the point of sound education reform. Countries that spend a fraction of the dollars America spends on public education—and presumably hold classes in less than stellar facilities—still run laps around the United States on international test scores.
Why? Well, because the laws of basic mathematics, for example, haven’t changed in, oh, say, forever. Neither have the fundamental building blocks of human knowledge. Osmosis, photosynthesis, algebra, geography, trigonometry, American history, phonics, composition … the core principles of learning remain largely fixed. There’s a reason Strunk & White is still one of the most frequently assigned textbooks on writing, despite the fact it was originally published in 1918.
Do we really believe that having a multimillion dollar Olympic swimming pool in one’s high school somehow magically translates into higher test scores in calculus? Does having showcase weight rooms and fancy escalators make students read and write better? Of course not.
Still, education bureaucrats continue building “Taj Mahal” schools such as the Robert F. Kennedy Community School in Los Angeles. The school has 4,200 kids. The price tag: a staggering $578 million. To put that in perspective, Beijing, China, spent just $500 million to build the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games. Invesco Field at Mile High, home of the Denver Broncos, cost just $400 million.
Presently, America spends an average of $10,000 per student per year. What have we gotten for our investment? Today, the United States ranks 25th out of 34 countries in math and 17th in science. More depressing than that is this: Since the 1970s, despite having tripled education spending, test scores have remained virtually unchanged.
If throwing money at the problem worked, we would have already solved it by now. And if installing swimming pools, weight rooms, escalators, plasma screens, and giving every kid an iPad would solve the problem, President Obama’s “school infrastructure” arguments would be the way to go. But unfortunately, the painful truth is that kids with 20-year-old dusty algebra books sitting in huts without air-conditioning will outperform American kids if they have strong teachers and, most importantly, strong parental involvement.
It’s that latter part—parents who create a culture of learning outside the classroom walls—that research reveals matters most. Parents who are willing to buy their child a PlayStation, but aren’t willing to buy Hooked on Phonics, are at the crux of so much that ails American education.
For example, we know that a child’s vocabulary, which is closely related to reading comprehension levels, correlates with how many words a child hears spoken or read to him or her. By age three, a child from a welfare family will know just 500 words, versus a child from a middle-class family, who will know 750. But a child whose parents went to college—and are therefore more likely to understand the critical importance of speaking and reading to kids—will have a cumulative vocabulary of 1,100 words. Even more depressing, we know that on the first day of kindergarten—before any teacher or Olympic swimming pool has had a chance to work its magic (or lack thereof)—children from the welfare families will have heard 32 million fewer words than a child whose parents immersed them in language.
This is heartbreaking. Children do not choose to be disenfranchised because their parents are unaware of the importance of early reading and speaking. But it’s the kids who will ultimately pay the price, because we know that the learning gap only widens as children move through higher grades. After fourth grade, when concepts and curriculum get harder and demand even greater parental home support and assistance, we know that a chasm begins to rip open between students who succeed and those who lag behind.
Taj Mahal schools that cost more than NFL football stadiums may make some people feel warm and fuzzy, but they aren’t the solution to our nation’s abysmal public education system. Great teachers go a long way. But it’s up to parents to instantiate a culture of learning inside the home, whether that home be a house, apartment or, yes, a trailer.
