Letters to the editor on Brooks' column

I predicted in my last email that David Brooks' column last week would "unfortunately provide fodder for those willing to excuse the failure of too many of our schools..." Sure enough, this letter to the editor appeared in yesterday's NYT, precisely capturing the pathetic woe-is-us, blame-the-victim attitude that pervades our public schools:

To the Editor:

David Brooks is correct: blaming educators for students who come to school unprepared to learn (if they show up at all) is like blaming doctors for the cancer rate. But that's what the No Child Left Behind act tacitly does, and what The New York Times editorial page constantly does: blame the educators.

In the last generation teachers haven't changed, but families have, and emotionally unregulated children cannot thrive.

It is, however, naïve to think that some smart politician will name the real problem any time soon. Finding fault with parents would alienate too many voters. It is smarter to keep scapegoating teachers.

Douglas Goetsch
New York, March 1, 2007
The writer has been a New York City high school teacher for 20 years.

His analogy of "blaming doctors for the cancer rate" is SO wrong! The proper analogy would be if a patient showed up at a hospital with symptoms of early-stage cancer and then the doctors: a) failed to do the proper tests to determine what was wrong; and b) once determining it was cancer, failed to treat it quickly and properly, allowing it to metastasize into something fatal. If this type of criminal negligence were being practiced in our hospitals, resulting in uncared-for patients dying left and right, there would be a justifiable hue and cry, yet this is precisely what is happening to millions of children in our school RIGHT NOW!

And lest you think I exaggerage the life-and-death nature of this, consider that 82% of America's prisoners are high school dropouts, 80% of prison inmates are functionally illiterate, and 52% of African-American men who fail to finish high school end up in prison at some point in their lives.

He is also completely wrong about this: "In the last generation teachers haven't changed, but families have, and emotionally unregulated children cannot thrive." Greene and Forster did an excellent study on this (see http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_06.htm#01.com), which conclusively rebuts this lame excuse for failure:

Defenders of the status quo claim the reason is that students are less teachable than they used to be; problems like poverty and social dysfunction have made the schools' job harder. They also claim that systematic reforms like school choice and accountability testing won't help, because students with low teachability levels can't be expected to learn better even with reforms unless the disadvantages that students bring to school are also addressed.

These claims are rarely subjected to serious scrutiny. This study, the first of its kind, systematically measures the teachability of students by examining sixteen social factors that researchers agree affect student teachability. Combining these factors into a single Teachability Index provides the first-ever valid measurement of whether schools are facing a student population with greater challenges to learning.

The Teachability Index shows that students today are actually somewhat easier to teach than they were thirty years ago.

It was good to see this letter to the editor, with the exact right answer:

To the Editor:

There is nothing new about saying that parents are important to education. Nor is there anything "creative" about presidential candidates talking about "improving the lives of students" since our schools began sacrificing academics for social work many years ago.

Rather, it is the brave, unconventional presidential candidates who will be talking about improving schools because they know it can be done. There are many examples of schools (KIPP and Catholic schools) that succeed in teaching poor and minority children without having to give up the notion that content — reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history — still counts.

Let us not slip back to the terribly destructive notion that schools can't make a difference in children's intellectual lives.

Peter Meyer
Hudson, N.Y., March 1, 2007