Education overhaul
A new book proposes system-wide education reform to reverse our disastrous course.
In 1983, a report by the United States National Commission on Excellence in Education sounded the alarm on the many failures in American education. Titled “A Nation at Risk,” it was followed by decades of educational reform efforts at the federal and state levels to quell the rising tide of mediocrity.
Unfortunately, a number of challenges facing American education in 2024 are just as they were 40 plus years ago. This has led education reform crusader Dr. Richard W. Garrett to call out the conventional education system and fight for its reform. His latest book, U.S. Education is in Trouble, Let’s Fix It! outlines 22 proposals to reform the U.S. public K-12 education system. “It’s not going to be easy to change the system,” Garrett writes.
Don’t expect an opening salvo of proposals — Garrett uses most of the book’s pages to lay out background on how education got to where it is today. Only later does he offer ideas he hopes will serve as a guide to direct the actions of vested interests, with the most prominent, according to Garrett, being the business community. While full of statistics and graphs, his research-laden analysis is consumable for a variety of readers from parents to educators and school leaders.
“Is this another book complaining about U.S. public education? Yes, it is,” Garrett writes. “But it’s different in that it will also focus on solutions to many of the problems. It is intended to provide the necessary background about the main issues and explain what needs to be done to fix those issues.”
Garrett identifies four stand-out reasons for the decline of the U.S. education system: parenting, irresponsible management by school boards and superintendents, runaway discipline problems, and social promotion.
Parents have a responsibility to send children to school who are respectful, responsible, and ready to learn. “Most of you are great and loving parents,” Garrett writes, “but there are large numbers of parents [who] may be loving but not careful enough in rearing their children.” For example, Garrett points out that the number of disruptive children indicates a disconnect between what parents are teaching at home (respect, courtesy, empathy, and the value of education) and what gets demonstrated in the classroom. The home instruction is faltering. Poor parenting is difficult to fix, and it is also a hard criticism to accept, Garrett points out. “The public just does not want to hear this argument [about parents’ role]; in their eyes, it’s the teacher’s job to manage the classroom,” Garrett says. “Generally, this would not be an unreasonable expectation, but in today’s world, a fairly high percentage of the children around the country are not manageable by most teachers.”
Add to this administrators who strip teachers of permission to discipline, teacher unions, and, of course, students who choose to be disruptive, and the responsibility for disruptive behavior falls in many different laps.
Just how big is the discipline problem? Garrett documents survey data and first-person accounts that capture a vast majority of teachers saying the school experience of most students suffers due to a few chronic offenders. In addition to suggesting that teaching character and grit or social-emotional learning at a young age are the antidotes to discipline problems, Garrett also offers this eyebrow-raising idea: “Place all the disruptive students in a separate class or better yet, a separate school. This at least gives the remaining teachers classes of children who can be taught. This also makes for happy teachers.”
This doesn’t mean the disruptive students should be “written off,” Garrett cautions. Rather, it offers these students an opportunity to expand their learning in a nurturing, structured environment. “Implementing special classes for disruptive students will cost money, but without them nothing changes and the U.S. falls further behind.”
Social promotion (promoting students to the next grade level regardless of whether they learned the standard material) from third grade to fourth grade even if the student is not reading at grade level is also a big issue, according to Garrett. “The odds are very likely they never catch up,” he writes. “The social side of this decision to promote students is an important consideration, but it pales in importance to promoting a child who will never learn to read properly.”
Garrett analyzed reading test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress across all the years it has been administered since its inception in 1992 and notes that 37 percent was the average number of poor readers, or about 2.2 million students for the entire nation. “So, 2.2 million students are pushed forward into the education stream each year who most likely never become adequate readers.” The fix? Develop a system that teaches every student how to read early on. “The most foolproof method is to start developing their reading skills at ages 3 and 4 and develop their print concept skills before they enter kindergarten.”
While the book includes a handful of technical missteps, these don’t detract from Garrett’s knowledge of and information on this all-too-crucial subject. American Experiment has been making many of the same points for years, and they will continue to bear repeating until all vested interests realize their role in much needed and overdue educational reform.