I've come to think of your typos as little love bumps on the road to my understanding of your perspective. They remind me that your competence as a writer is wholly human, unleveled by NYT-style and/or AI editing. I'm looking forward to finding them in your writing on contemporary American child-rearing culture; that piece where you share you let strangers touch your baby made me cry.
I agree with most things you write about education. But as someone who has been in the trenches of public education, so to speak, for 16 years, I do think there's truth to the notion that we used to do some things better.
NCLB and related legislation has placed a heavy emphasis on graduation rates. At this point we will do everything in our power to make sure students don't fail and walk across that stage. This has led to a watering down of standards, and inflation of GPA, across the board. #MakeAmericansFailAgain
Testing pressures have led to an increase in math and English instruction, to the detriment of other classes. Notwithstanding decades of study showing us that throwing kids into English for 120 minutes a day doesn't make them do better on English tests, were just keep doing it and so kids get less science, history, art, music, etc.
Ideological pressures have reduced the amount of content we teach about Presidents, the American Revolution, our country's history and heroes. I now EXPECT most kids in a non-AP class to not know America became a country after fighting England in the Revolutionary War. This is incredibly sad to me.
So yes, we'll never close the achievement gap, adding all the kids means we'll see lower scores, etc. But I do not think it's right to say we aren't failing in some regards now compared to the past. When we were kids, Freddie, people knew who we fought in the Revolutionary War
"NCLB and related legislation has placed a heavy emphasis on graduation rates. At this point we will do everything in our power to make sure students don't fail and walk across that stage. This has led to a watering down of standards, and inflation of GPA, across the board. #MakeAmericansFailAgain"
But this degradation is a product of the accountability movement!
I think Freddie's point is that they can't. Because the one way they could be made better (more selectivity) would translate into less "kids walking across that stage" and politicians and parents refuse to accept that.
There's a difference between SELECTIVITY (which we do not have virtually any of as a public school) and STANDARDS.
I do not think we can go back to selectively not admitting the mentally retarded children. But we could absolutely go back to having standards. Society bounces back from extremes. Eventually people will notice their kids don't know anything
No, that's not what selectivity means. Selectivity means to select, right? Private schools are selective. Colleges are selective. Public high schools do not have this ability by and large.
If my student Maceyn fails, that has nothing to do with selectivity. If we have standards, he'll repeat 10th grade (or the relevant class). If we have no standards, he'll move on to 11th grade despite failing the government class. But there's no different in selection. Maceyn is with us either way.
For sure. Phones are definitely a confounding variable here. But elementary school students are less affected by phones, and they're little sponges. I agree with your broad points about education, but sometimes you run the risk of saying that teaching doesn't matter at all, and that's obviously not true.
The choices we make as educators matter. If we choose to keep lowering the bar and teaching less, our students will know less. If we tell them they don't need to read books, they'll be worse at reading.
Yes, young children are sponges but more and more of the ones I know are being saturated and pacified by hours and hours of low-quality, screen-based media consumption. They are learning to be primarily consumers of media, goods, and services. . . not creators of purpose and meaning. I've been training or working as a teacher of 2 to 10-year-old children since roughly the launch of the iPhone. Since 2011, I've worked eight school years as a preschool and/or kindergarten teacher, given birth to one child, and become an aunt to five others.
My experience is emphatically not that young children have been less negatively impacted than adolescents by changes to media consumption in the last two decades. Instead, I think the impacts on young children have been harder to measure and especially measure across time but are ultimately likely the most pernicious. The testing of early childhood development is unfortunately so much less precise and a whole lot more confounded by relativistic, adult judgements (including those made by the booming industry of mostly perversely incentivized parenting advice/self-help/services). A lot of the mainstream ECE "testing" I've been required to engage in my career has caregivers/family members make judgements about a young child by comparing them to their current same-age peers with things like the pediatrician's bromide, "Do you have any concerns about your child's _____ development?"
I fear we're now dealing with a multi-generational trend of treating both early childhoods and raising young children as primarily a collection of undesirable tasks to endure rather than an integral component of passing our skills and values to the next generation. The discussion in the comments to this article around reintegrating competency in the trades into the goals of American education feels worthwhile but also pretty quaint to me. In my work as a preschool and kindergarten teacher, I'm experiencing an erosion of the goals that children learn to find purpose and meaning in creating or serving in any capacity. Many adult family members of my students can't get past the goal of keeping their child(ren) base-line content/pacified amid the child's and their family's addictive relationships to various media and other consumer goods/services (dopamine slot machines, all of them)!
So, when I first read Freddie's article, I couldn't stop thinking about how American education discourse is suffering from a serious case of "boy that cried wolf." A cacophonous adult tantrum centered around false beliefs that American schools are somehow less efficacious than in the past has drowned out most other perspectives or concerns. What Freddie correctly argues has really been happening, long-term, has a lot more to do with American education gradually becoming more inclusive/less selective and detracked/desegregated by ability or advantage. We've added students of more diverse ability levels while reducing the number and location of educational attainment goals. It's to the point that any realism about an individual child's educational potential or especially lack thereof is usually understood as demoralizing to dehumanizing (Barbra Ehrenrieich's concept of Bright-siding has helped me understand this last dynamic).
I wonder if our tantrums over "failing schools" might actually be misplaced emotional reactions to the fact our schools' purposes are increasingly to be holding tanks for passive consumers (the real primary economic purpose of most Americans in the 21st century)? This would certainly make some sense of the billions we've spent on installing increasingly complex media displays in our children's schools (despite increasingly strong evidence that they don't improve learning outcomes). . .
And now, in the medium term of the last decade, it's somehow become very hard to argue that allowing our children to scroll on touch screens hooked to bottomless pits of algorithmically-personalized brain rot is bad for their development in a society-jeopardizing way! For most of human history, young children took mostly small physical and social risks, otherwise known as "play" in the real world, and learned how to navigate and make meaning out of their unique time and place from there. Then, they took those life and learning skills to various apprenticeships and, increasingly, educational opportunities to make as much meaning and purpose as they could out the life paths available to them. . . our consumer habits, especially our media consumption habits, seem to be whittling away at opportunities to do this in increasingly W.E.I.R.D. ways.
Coda for James K.: After reading your comments, I asked my third-grade son to tell me what he knows about how America became a county and then recorded him going off for four and a half minutes with just a few non-corrective, refocusing prompts from me. It was a riot to hear him imperfectly describe the basic contours of the Revolutionary War, including something he called "The Great Tea Party." But what really made me proud was his understanding of Federalism and the Constitution coming into being after the war, "the guys in charge figured out they would need to have another party to write our constitution"! He's a bright, curious kid and his background knowledge is growing faster than we can keep tabs on now. But, I'd be willing to bet a lot on the fact that the majority of the knowledge he dropped in my recording came from streaming video (of Hamilton on Broadway, random TedEd and Vox videos, probably a Johnny Harris series on the origins of the Constitution I vaguely remember him watching a few months back) and was in no substantial way based on three years attending his (richer, whiter, and therefore higher-performing) public elementary school in a larger urban district. Just a little riff of personal testimony to temper my perspective on the real causes of educational decline: our society's ever diversifying and expanding media consumption is no more an engine of social equity than our education systems ever were.
Very well argued. I grew up steeped in the rhetoric of a meritocratic education system that provided opportunity for all. I suppose you could argue that broad access to higher education is still economically and morally meaningful, as a means of identifying and promoting those with academic talent regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or gender. You don't want to ignore the geniuses who really _will_ invent the Next Big Thing, just because they were poor or Black or female. But that's restoring education to it's role as a filtering mechanism, which as you argue is the opposite of it's current goal of educating _everyone_ into prosperity.
This is the critical question: what are we going to do with this growing underclass of people whose jobs are being automated away by technology? I think we could do a lot to restore respectability to the trades -- plumbers, electricians and the like, semi-skilled labor that still requires a physical body. But even that, I think, can only take up so much of the slack, especially with AI gnawing away at the lower levels of information work. Seriously, now: what are we going to do with them? (Especially since "them" will someday mean "me".) Any answer I can come up with sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
"This is the critical question: what are we going to do with this growing underclass of people whose jobs are being automated away by technology?"
A lot of them are going to be underpaid, under-supported health care aides and the like for the wave of baby boomers that will need substantial assistance as they age. These jobs are already growing much faster than other employment sectors. The federal government is basically a military attached to massive entitlement programs that funnel the country's wealth to elderly people.
Now there's a sudden interest in everyone becoming an electrician or a plumber. For decades people in the trades were telling their kids to go to college and not get their hands dirty...for low pay.
There are a lot of jobs that need to be done. Where I live there is a need for 500,000 acres of forestland that needs good management for fuel reduction and restoration. That would employ a lot of people. But we don't have the money. We do have the money to spend a billion dollars a day creating an environmental and social disaster so GI Joes can have some fun.
The real problem is how do we redirect work to where it's really needed given our current economic incentives.
My father was one of those tradesmen (a tool-and-die maker) who told his kids to go to college (which we did). Now one of my sons is a blacksmith and welder, and honestly, his economic prospects are just as good as the two who went the academic route.
Attitudes are slowly changing. If I had told my father I wanted to drop out of college and go into the trades, he would have been ashamed. But when I tell me friends about my welder son, nearly all of incredibly supportive: "That's awesome! No college debt, and a good job! I wish my kids did that!"
My father was a welder...he switched to crew pusher when he found out about the high cancer rates for welders. Still made everything out of pipe. He framed a barn at my place out of oilfield pipe.
One of my sons did welding. Almost got his AA but he went into wildland firefighting. Modern day coal mining as far as lung disease. He loves the comradery and the forest. I love the forest too. He has fun telling the guys that his mother taught him how to use the chainsaw.
I think trades are great, but they aren't a panacea. There are some major health issues with welding and wildland firefighting is all I'm saying. There should be some mitigations, though I don't know how you make a filter that will allow a person to sprint up a hillside with a 60lb pack in the heat and still get enough oxygen.
I teach mostly Honors classes at a relatively (for my district) high-performing public high school where we have almost no gatekeeping for Honors and AP classes. So many kids get shoved into my class because they/their parents want them to graduate with an advanced diploma and be "college-ready." Meanwhile the kid has never tested above the 15th percentile in reading or math, uses AI for everything they can, fails nearly every assessment, and has a virtual scroll of IEP accommodations, some of which are arguably modifications by another name, and the vast majority of which will not be available in college.
My partner teaches at the university most of these kids will transfer to after two years at the local CC (if they finish those two years, which many don't). I know what's expected of them, and a lot of them are not going to be successful in higher education. Which is 100% fine as far as what it says about the kid--not everyone's strengths are academic!--but I did not get into teaching just to feed parents' delusion and set teenagers up for disappointment and crushing blows to their self-esteem.
Oh, my! I teach special education students at a relatively (for my district) high-performing public high school where we have almost no gatekeeping for our standard-level and higher-level IB classes. Everything you say here is in lock-step with what I see. I have kids who do just fine in 9-10th grade (fair enough) when we're doing algebra/biology/etc., then getting hammered with the diploma programme curriculum in 11-12th grade, and the parents are like, "WTF?" Well, college material is a different level, and proficiency at that level is not just a modification or accommodation away. And while many of my students do very well (even in comparison to their reg ed peers), as you say at the end of your first paragraph, they and their families are not at all prepared for what accommodations look like in college and how that will affect their grade(s).
Showing how long it's been since I was in high school ... I had to do (non-Google) internet search to learn the meaning of "IEP accommodations" and "IB classes" in the two previous posts!
Neither of my parents finished high school. That was pretty normal for most people until after WWII. Father got into IBEW based on naval assignment as radio operator w/o h.s. diploma .
Schools have been trying, and failing, to raise the ceiling (college prep for all) but should be raising the floor (basic literacy/math/civics/etc.) as the kids sort themselves into various tracks.
Almost everyone can read and use a calculator. Basic literacy is a solved problem.
Civics is useless. In most western democraties, it requires temperament - something few have. The best system I'm aware of (but would need to learn more about) is the Swiss local democracies. They've managed to force voters to think carefully about fiscal trade offs. Geniuses, those Swiss.
Most recent reports: 25-30% of recent high school grads read at the lowest literacy level, which makes them functionally illiterate. 45% of recent graduates scored below the “basic” level of math skills, making them functionally innumerate.
I’ll admit I don’t know what != means… I’m guessing does not equal? Definitions for the terms functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate vary by study. But it appears that the trends for recent high school graduates are getting worse and these somewhat outdated statistics are already really alarming:
In my limited research, ~25% of adults cannot make calculations with whole numbers and percentages, estimate numbers or quantity, and interpret simple statistics in text or tables.
And 54% of adults reading below a 6th grade level.
This is an excellent essay and there were no good old days of education anywhere for general populations.
It wasn't until St. Isidore of Seville's Fourth National Council of Toledo that cathedral schools became the norm to educate the clergy--not everyday people.
And of course Latin was the written language of the educated. All the liturgical paintings and statuary in churches was an attempt to educate common people visually.
Not until printing presses did vernacular reading material became available. But literacy stayed low.
Jumping ahead to think about H.G. Wells' education in England in the 1880s--it was a mish mash of private parent funded opportunities. Dewitt Clinton in the U.S. in the 1800s helped establish the idea of universal school. This is just to point out how FdB is correct. We have never had universal college ready schooling in the history of the world. These are just a few things off the top of my head there are certainly excellent histories to pursue this.
My husband was a carpenter. The math he could do in his head would have blown the top off the SATS, but he liked being a carpenter. He especially liked building staircases. He was also a big reader. H.S. grad. drafted to VN.
o misspoke, I mean a lot of geometric figuring . I said math because I was making a comment abt the analytical skills of carpenters with angles and weight bearing for stair cases, etc. but shorthanded what I mean. Sorry to be unclear.
My 16-year-old son loves (and crushes) math. He thinks he will probably get some kind of Engineering degree in college. Like 4 of his six aunts and uncles and all four of his cousins. Funny. Anyhow, the other day he spent 3 hours working on his e-bike, came inside and said: "Wow, that felt like 30 minutes, not three hours". I said, "Dude, that's called the flow state, so if AI eats all the tech jobs, you will love being a skilled tradesman, and probably make more money."
I suspect the college for all era is coming to an abrupt end. We went to a new bookkeeper to do our taxes. We talked a bit about college. Our youngest is just finishing up a vascular imaging degree and her youngest is getting ready to go to college. He's majoring in baseball and ??? His mother is looking at $45K a year. Probably a good chunk of student loan debt too.
This is at a time that the middle-class white collar work...including STEM jobs look to be going away. I've got a kid with a software engineering degree working in food service. It's not all the job market, but I'm not so sure that what he's doing doesn't have just as much long term potential as working in a big company who's replacing coders with AI.
I sure wouldn't be encouraging my kids to go to college as the pathway to economic security anymore. I think it's going to go back to being a play place for the rich and a workplace for the top .01% in intelligence.
Because I am old (59), I remember the days before we started forcing all students to receive identical educations—educations that are far too academic for the interests and abilities of many kids. School systems used to have multiple programs to serve students’ differing needs and abilities.
For example, I attended an enormous (2100 kids in grades 10–12) public high school in a working-class rural community. In my graduating class of 700, only about a dozen of us went on to selective colleges. More graduates went into the military than to four-year colleges.
Our high school offered honors and regular classes, and its minimum requirements for graduation were not difficult. Students could graduate after two trimesters of Consumer Math, three years of English, two years of social studies, and one year of science electives (these classes could be pretty easy, for example Animal Behavior, which a friend passed by tying wheeled legos to a chick’s feet and “teaching” it to roller-skate). No further classes in math, science, or foreign languages were required.
Our high school also allowed students to leave campus after lunch and attend classes at a nearby vocational school. Other students left after lunch to go to paying jobs. Many students chose to participate in these programs.
This system seemed to work well for everyone. Of course, back then you could get an ok job with a high school diploma, even from a school with requirements as easy as those at my school. As I read over this comment, I’m realizing that my community and high school pretty much did exactly what Freddie has always recommended—allow students to choose a less-academic path if that works for them, but also ensure that everyone can lead a reasonably comfortable life, regardless of their academic achievements.
"... but also ensure that everyone can lead a reasonably comfortable life, regardless of their academic achievements."
That's the hard part. Freddie says politicians chose those policies that led to deindustrialisation etc. They didn't. It's the logic of the system and it made most Americans incredibly wealthy.
"As late as the 19th century, when mass public schooling was beginning to take shape in Europe and America, the explicit and stated goal of elementary education was functional literacy and basic numeracy (enough to be a productive worker and citizen) while anything beyond that was understood to be for a different kind of person entirely. This “tracking” was not incidental; it was the point."
Sort of OT, but interesting how that worked out in practical terms. "Common Sense" was not a simple tract, but it sold in Colonial America like hotcakes, you'd think the printers were handing out free money.
Abraham Lincoln had a total of six weeks of formal schooling in his life, more or less, yet he was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker, leader or speaker. His memes such as "The Father of Waters flows again unvexed to the sea" are not the product of a smoothbrain, but are are still talked about today. He also was a highly successful lawyer before he became Abraham Lincoln.
That's because intelligence was more widespread across the classes and less sorted for than now. Our meritocratic system is pretty good at promoting intelligence wherever it finds it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates may have grown in a poor neighbourhood of Baltimore during the crack epidemic from a father who might have had his intelligence ignored because he was Black but I bet you whatever you want that Ta-Nehisi's kids will have no problems achieving whatever educational level is warranted by their smarts. Maybe even above and beyond as I imagine Ta-Nehisi and his wife/partner won't skimp on private education etc.
"Our meritocratic system is pretty good at promoting intelligence wherever it finds it." I don't think that's especially true. Our system provides some "ins" for people able to discover and exploit them, but it does not actually filter for those people - it advances plenty of (variously) mediocre people and misses plenty of (variously) talented people.
The fact that SOME poor people manage to break into the intelligentsia is not strong evidence that the intelligentsia is finding and elevating talented poor people.
This is all aside from, say, disability, which can derail your ability to access resources regular people take for granted, without reflecting specifically on your intelligence or talent. In the US, where healthcare is tied to employment, a loss of one can cause a spiral of loss in both that has little to do with merit.
I'm not saying the entire US system is fair! I'm saying the school system will surface raw intellectual talent decently well.
I'm sure there must have been countless studies around that but the simple fact that Black people and nonwhites are now in the intelligentsia circles is proof that the educational system is a lot more meritocratic than it was before.
Also - the fact that people like GWB or Trump also graduate from top institutions doesn't mean those institutions aren't ferreting out intelligent poor people effectively. It just means they compromise and let in people on criteria other than intelligence, if they have money and power.
" it advances plenty of (variously) mediocre people and misses plenty of (variously) talented people."
Not so. Lots of data shows otherwise. You have a deeply flawed understanding of mediocre. Restriction of range hurts analysis.
"The fact that SOME poor people manage to break into the intelligentsia is not strong evidence that the intelligentsia is finding and elevating talented poor people."
Considering that I came up poor and know plenty of very smart people who did poorly in school, I'm inclined to not believe you when you say "The fact is that all or nearly all do." That seems absurd on face. If there is SOOOO much ready evidence for this, I encourage you to share it
I think some of the problem comes from the fact that the people who talk about education, and who set policies for education, are almost universally people who were abnormally successful in education. So they don't have the perspective of all the people who didn't succeed.
I'm certainly one of them! School was always very easy for me. Success came naturally. When I didn't get as good a grade as I could, it was only because I hadn't worked hard enough or cared enough.
But because of our ideology of equality (which is good in many ways, certainly better than the racial caste system that preceded it!), most members of the intellectual class are incapable of accepting that differences in educational success can be natural.
I think I dodged that trap due to being homeschooled in a classical Christian humanist manner, with great attention paid to history and the breadth of human experience, and with a somewhat critical perspective on the various ideologies of modernity.
I own a copy of Cult of Smart and it’s excellent - well argued and thoroughly legit cover-to-cover. But FWIW I saw the change unfold starting in the 80s. Teaching in LAUSD made for a close view. The rationale was strongly supported by the story of Jaime Escalante, whose astonishing success at the district’s Garfield HS was dramatized in the movie “Stand and Deliver”. A Bolivian immigrant who had taught math before coming to LoCali, he had single-handedly elevated math instruction at a typical big barrio high school and produced a crop of kids whose performance in AP calculus was so uncharacteristically strong that it raised suspicions of cheating. Re-testing was conducted and completely vindicated the students and their teacher.
That happened in the early 80s and the movie came out in ‘89. I started teaching that summer. I didn’t charge into it with that story in mind but it did provide a measure of inspiration over time, particularly since my students were a close match for his. In those days racist stereotyping was a venerable part of the picture, and the shunting of kids into voc ed was accurately viewed as a function of structural racism. Of course the economy was very different then, but raising expectations of academic achievement was a tack in line with Cali’s exceptionally good and remarkably affordable public higher education system. It was positioned to hold up its end of the bargain, having done so with great efficiency from the beginning of the post war era.
That’s a bit of context most are unaware of today, but I do think it renders a lot of clarity. Things are different now. I have a no regrets about my path through Cali’s public higher ed system in the 70s and 80s, but if I had to plot a future today I’d strongly consider becoming an electrician first and taking art classes later.
Escalante taught at Garfield for some years before he was able to get AP calc going. It was an uphill battle and took time. Of course he didn’t manufacture a miracle -it took a long term effort. And yes, he selected for talent, and didn’t turn math-deficient students into geniuses. What he did do was identify capable kids who would’ve otherwise lacked opportunity. He then supplied excellent instruction and motivation, and never shied away from challenging them. All of that had previously been lacking and therefore had been beyond their reach.
The cheating allegations specifically arose from the fact that the students’ tests showed uncannily identical proofs. The allegations weren’t baseless. He had taught specific problem solutions and their work reflected that. I have also read within the last few years that students who were involved admitted to communicating about the problems, and the test administrators caught something fishy, which is to their credit and goes far toward legitimizing the assessment and their monitoring of the results. Nonetheless the students were re-tested under secure conditions and their pass-rate remained high.
The story was simplified for public consumption as a movie - quite effectively. That doesn’t diminish Escalante’s achievement or alter the fact that he was able to raise student performance and expectations. He also got institutional support after an administrative change and talented younger teachers helped expand the program.
I have subscribed to FdB for years, partly for his bracing honesty about the range of educational performance and test-score results. I taught for 35 years and am well aware of it. But something that gets lost in the debate (invariably by armchair quarterback commenters) to which he and Cult of Smart contribute much of value is the reality that, though there will always be an array of academic performance (or relative performance on a much bigger variety of tasks), there will also be wide variability among students, schools, teachers, and the specific local cultures that produce them.
In the case of Escalante and Garfield High what was missing was the effort and structure that would afford expression of it. It wasn’t a case of manufacturing smart kids out of dumb ones. It was an example of providing an opportunity to allow smart kids to show what they could do. That’s the whole point. Escalante was ‘old school’ and knew that, on a campus with 2500+ kids, and despite appearances to the contrary that reflected an unambitious institutional approach, there were bound to be capable performers. He was proven right.
The pendulum was on the other side then, and the push to place working class kids of all stripes into voc ed had a class-prejudice impetus - it reflected broad common tendencies and wasn’t simply a racist plot. It reflected a disdain for the great unwashed of all kinds and affected ‘ethnic’, hillbilly, okie and poor white kids in great numbers also. The pendulum has swung and now the tendency is to push too many toward college. Part of the impetus for the change is the budgetary savings to be had by closing shop classes that entail high overhead and liability costs. Schools face relentless performance-based funding scrutiny and wood shop doesn’t provide much bang that way.
I apologize for all the typos. I hate to use the baby excuse all the time, but.... Jesus, it's a lot of time and energy to have an 11-month-old.
My favorite was “We’ve never done good in international comparisons…”
I thought that was on purpose.
Well well well...
I've come to think of your typos as little love bumps on the road to my understanding of your perspective. They remind me that your competence as a writer is wholly human, unleveled by NYT-style and/or AI editing. I'm looking forward to finding them in your writing on contemporary American child-rearing culture; that piece where you share you let strangers touch your baby made me cry.
I agree with most things you write about education. But as someone who has been in the trenches of public education, so to speak, for 16 years, I do think there's truth to the notion that we used to do some things better.
NCLB and related legislation has placed a heavy emphasis on graduation rates. At this point we will do everything in our power to make sure students don't fail and walk across that stage. This has led to a watering down of standards, and inflation of GPA, across the board. #MakeAmericansFailAgain
Testing pressures have led to an increase in math and English instruction, to the detriment of other classes. Notwithstanding decades of study showing us that throwing kids into English for 120 minutes a day doesn't make them do better on English tests, were just keep doing it and so kids get less science, history, art, music, etc.
Ideological pressures have reduced the amount of content we teach about Presidents, the American Revolution, our country's history and heroes. I now EXPECT most kids in a non-AP class to not know America became a country after fighting England in the Revolutionary War. This is incredibly sad to me.
So yes, we'll never close the achievement gap, adding all the kids means we'll see lower scores, etc. But I do not think it's right to say we aren't failing in some regards now compared to the past. When we were kids, Freddie, people knew who we fought in the Revolutionary War
"NCLB and related legislation has placed a heavy emphasis on graduation rates. At this point we will do everything in our power to make sure students don't fail and walk across that stage. This has led to a watering down of standards, and inflation of GPA, across the board. #MakeAmericansFailAgain"
But this degradation is a product of the accountability movement!
I know. Shocking that the accountability movement would be not holding kids accountable, right?
But my point was just that some things ARE worse than they used to be. And could be made better.
I think Freddie's point is that they can't. Because the one way they could be made better (more selectivity) would translate into less "kids walking across that stage" and politicians and parents refuse to accept that.
There's a difference between SELECTIVITY (which we do not have virtually any of as a public school) and STANDARDS.
I do not think we can go back to selectively not admitting the mentally retarded children. But we could absolutely go back to having standards. Society bounces back from extremes. Eventually people will notice their kids don't know anything
Standards and selectivity are ultimately the same thing. If you set any standard, some will fail them.
No, that's not what selectivity means. Selectivity means to select, right? Private schools are selective. Colleges are selective. Public high schools do not have this ability by and large.
If my student Maceyn fails, that has nothing to do with selectivity. If we have standards, he'll repeat 10th grade (or the relevant class). If we have no standards, he'll move on to 11th grade despite failing the government class. But there's no different in selection. Maceyn is with us either way.
I mean the biggest issue is that I suspect recent testing dips aren't caused by anything that happened in the classroom but by the phones
For sure. Phones are definitely a confounding variable here. But elementary school students are less affected by phones, and they're little sponges. I agree with your broad points about education, but sometimes you run the risk of saying that teaching doesn't matter at all, and that's obviously not true.
The choices we make as educators matter. If we choose to keep lowering the bar and teaching less, our students will know less. If we tell them they don't need to read books, they'll be worse at reading.
Yes, young children are sponges but more and more of the ones I know are being saturated and pacified by hours and hours of low-quality, screen-based media consumption. They are learning to be primarily consumers of media, goods, and services. . . not creators of purpose and meaning. I've been training or working as a teacher of 2 to 10-year-old children since roughly the launch of the iPhone. Since 2011, I've worked eight school years as a preschool and/or kindergarten teacher, given birth to one child, and become an aunt to five others.
My experience is emphatically not that young children have been less negatively impacted than adolescents by changes to media consumption in the last two decades. Instead, I think the impacts on young children have been harder to measure and especially measure across time but are ultimately likely the most pernicious. The testing of early childhood development is unfortunately so much less precise and a whole lot more confounded by relativistic, adult judgements (including those made by the booming industry of mostly perversely incentivized parenting advice/self-help/services). A lot of the mainstream ECE "testing" I've been required to engage in my career has caregivers/family members make judgements about a young child by comparing them to their current same-age peers with things like the pediatrician's bromide, "Do you have any concerns about your child's _____ development?"
I fear we're now dealing with a multi-generational trend of treating both early childhoods and raising young children as primarily a collection of undesirable tasks to endure rather than an integral component of passing our skills and values to the next generation. The discussion in the comments to this article around reintegrating competency in the trades into the goals of American education feels worthwhile but also pretty quaint to me. In my work as a preschool and kindergarten teacher, I'm experiencing an erosion of the goals that children learn to find purpose and meaning in creating or serving in any capacity. Many adult family members of my students can't get past the goal of keeping their child(ren) base-line content/pacified amid the child's and their family's addictive relationships to various media and other consumer goods/services (dopamine slot machines, all of them)!
Here's a very current, mainstream article covering a survey of ECE educators concerning physical, social, and life skill development in young children. It shows I'm at least far from alone in my perspective while also making plain the impressionistic, imprecise measurement that plagues research in this domain: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/toileting-and-tying-shoes-young-students-increasingly-lack-basic-skills/2026/03
So, when I first read Freddie's article, I couldn't stop thinking about how American education discourse is suffering from a serious case of "boy that cried wolf." A cacophonous adult tantrum centered around false beliefs that American schools are somehow less efficacious than in the past has drowned out most other perspectives or concerns. What Freddie correctly argues has really been happening, long-term, has a lot more to do with American education gradually becoming more inclusive/less selective and detracked/desegregated by ability or advantage. We've added students of more diverse ability levels while reducing the number and location of educational attainment goals. It's to the point that any realism about an individual child's educational potential or especially lack thereof is usually understood as demoralizing to dehumanizing (Barbra Ehrenrieich's concept of Bright-siding has helped me understand this last dynamic).
I wonder if our tantrums over "failing schools" might actually be misplaced emotional reactions to the fact our schools' purposes are increasingly to be holding tanks for passive consumers (the real primary economic purpose of most Americans in the 21st century)? This would certainly make some sense of the billions we've spent on installing increasingly complex media displays in our children's schools (despite increasingly strong evidence that they don't improve learning outcomes). . .
And now, in the medium term of the last decade, it's somehow become very hard to argue that allowing our children to scroll on touch screens hooked to bottomless pits of algorithmically-personalized brain rot is bad for their development in a society-jeopardizing way! For most of human history, young children took mostly small physical and social risks, otherwise known as "play" in the real world, and learned how to navigate and make meaning out of their unique time and place from there. Then, they took those life and learning skills to various apprenticeships and, increasingly, educational opportunities to make as much meaning and purpose as they could out the life paths available to them. . . our consumer habits, especially our media consumption habits, seem to be whittling away at opportunities to do this in increasingly W.E.I.R.D. ways.
Coda for James K.: After reading your comments, I asked my third-grade son to tell me what he knows about how America became a county and then recorded him going off for four and a half minutes with just a few non-corrective, refocusing prompts from me. It was a riot to hear him imperfectly describe the basic contours of the Revolutionary War, including something he called "The Great Tea Party." But what really made me proud was his understanding of Federalism and the Constitution coming into being after the war, "the guys in charge figured out they would need to have another party to write our constitution"! He's a bright, curious kid and his background knowledge is growing faster than we can keep tabs on now. But, I'd be willing to bet a lot on the fact that the majority of the knowledge he dropped in my recording came from streaming video (of Hamilton on Broadway, random TedEd and Vox videos, probably a Johnny Harris series on the origins of the Constitution I vaguely remember him watching a few months back) and was in no substantial way based on three years attending his (richer, whiter, and therefore higher-performing) public elementary school in a larger urban district. Just a little riff of personal testimony to temper my perspective on the real causes of educational decline: our society's ever diversifying and expanding media consumption is no more an engine of social equity than our education systems ever were.
Glad your son knows about the Great Tea Party ;)
I have always loved your articles on education, this one was as great as all the others.
Very well argued. I grew up steeped in the rhetoric of a meritocratic education system that provided opportunity for all. I suppose you could argue that broad access to higher education is still economically and morally meaningful, as a means of identifying and promoting those with academic talent regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or gender. You don't want to ignore the geniuses who really _will_ invent the Next Big Thing, just because they were poor or Black or female. But that's restoring education to it's role as a filtering mechanism, which as you argue is the opposite of it's current goal of educating _everyone_ into prosperity.
This is the critical question: what are we going to do with this growing underclass of people whose jobs are being automated away by technology? I think we could do a lot to restore respectability to the trades -- plumbers, electricians and the like, semi-skilled labor that still requires a physical body. But even that, I think, can only take up so much of the slack, especially with AI gnawing away at the lower levels of information work. Seriously, now: what are we going to do with them? (Especially since "them" will someday mean "me".) Any answer I can come up with sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
"This is the critical question: what are we going to do with this growing underclass of people whose jobs are being automated away by technology?"
A lot of them are going to be underpaid, under-supported health care aides and the like for the wave of baby boomers that will need substantial assistance as they age. These jobs are already growing much faster than other employment sectors. The federal government is basically a military attached to massive entitlement programs that funnel the country's wealth to elderly people.
Now there's a sudden interest in everyone becoming an electrician or a plumber. For decades people in the trades were telling their kids to go to college and not get their hands dirty...for low pay.
There are a lot of jobs that need to be done. Where I live there is a need for 500,000 acres of forestland that needs good management for fuel reduction and restoration. That would employ a lot of people. But we don't have the money. We do have the money to spend a billion dollars a day creating an environmental and social disaster so GI Joes can have some fun.
The real problem is how do we redirect work to where it's really needed given our current economic incentives.
My father was one of those tradesmen (a tool-and-die maker) who told his kids to go to college (which we did). Now one of my sons is a blacksmith and welder, and honestly, his economic prospects are just as good as the two who went the academic route.
Attitudes are slowly changing. If I had told my father I wanted to drop out of college and go into the trades, he would have been ashamed. But when I tell me friends about my welder son, nearly all of incredibly supportive: "That's awesome! No college debt, and a good job! I wish my kids did that!"
My father was a welder...he switched to crew pusher when he found out about the high cancer rates for welders. Still made everything out of pipe. He framed a barn at my place out of oilfield pipe.
One of my sons did welding. Almost got his AA but he went into wildland firefighting. Modern day coal mining as far as lung disease. He loves the comradery and the forest. I love the forest too. He has fun telling the guys that his mother taught him how to use the chainsaw.
None of our kids have college debt. We paid most of it. They all worked part time and moderate inheritance.
I'm not sure I'm getting the message. The trades are great except for the cancers that they'll give you?
I think trades are great, but they aren't a panacea. There are some major health issues with welding and wildland firefighting is all I'm saying. There should be some mitigations, though I don't know how you make a filter that will allow a person to sprint up a hillside with a 60lb pack in the heat and still get enough oxygen.
Trades have always come with health risks as part of the job.
Even unions accepted this as a fact for most of the 20th century as far as I can tell.
I teach mostly Honors classes at a relatively (for my district) high-performing public high school where we have almost no gatekeeping for Honors and AP classes. So many kids get shoved into my class because they/their parents want them to graduate with an advanced diploma and be "college-ready." Meanwhile the kid has never tested above the 15th percentile in reading or math, uses AI for everything they can, fails nearly every assessment, and has a virtual scroll of IEP accommodations, some of which are arguably modifications by another name, and the vast majority of which will not be available in college.
My partner teaches at the university most of these kids will transfer to after two years at the local CC (if they finish those two years, which many don't). I know what's expected of them, and a lot of them are not going to be successful in higher education. Which is 100% fine as far as what it says about the kid--not everyone's strengths are academic!--but I did not get into teaching just to feed parents' delusion and set teenagers up for disappointment and crushing blows to their self-esteem.
Oh, my! I teach special education students at a relatively (for my district) high-performing public high school where we have almost no gatekeeping for our standard-level and higher-level IB classes. Everything you say here is in lock-step with what I see. I have kids who do just fine in 9-10th grade (fair enough) when we're doing algebra/biology/etc., then getting hammered with the diploma programme curriculum in 11-12th grade, and the parents are like, "WTF?" Well, college material is a different level, and proficiency at that level is not just a modification or accommodation away. And while many of my students do very well (even in comparison to their reg ed peers), as you say at the end of your first paragraph, they and their families are not at all prepared for what accommodations look like in college and how that will affect their grade(s).
Showing how long it's been since I was in high school ... I had to do (non-Google) internet search to learn the meaning of "IEP accommodations" and "IB classes" in the two previous posts!
Neither of my parents finished high school. That was pretty normal for most people until after WWII. Father got into IBEW based on naval assignment as radio operator w/o h.s. diploma .
Schools have been trying, and failing, to raise the ceiling (college prep for all) but should be raising the floor (basic literacy/math/civics/etc.) as the kids sort themselves into various tracks.
Almost everyone can read and use a calculator. Basic literacy is a solved problem.
Civics is useless. In most western democraties, it requires temperament - something few have. The best system I'm aware of (but would need to learn more about) is the Swiss local democracies. They've managed to force voters to think carefully about fiscal trade offs. Geniuses, those Swiss.
Most recent reports: 25-30% of recent high school grads read at the lowest literacy level, which makes them functionally illiterate. 45% of recent graduates scored below the “basic” level of math skills, making them functionally innumerate.
No way. It's got to be worse than that.
I suspect it is!
"lowest literacy level" != functionally illiterate.
Nor does below basic = functionally innumerate.
I’ll admit I don’t know what != means… I’m guessing does not equal? Definitions for the terms functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate vary by study. But it appears that the trends for recent high school graduates are getting worse and these somewhat outdated statistics are already really alarming:
In my limited research, ~25% of adults cannot make calculations with whole numbers and percentages, estimate numbers or quantity, and interpret simple statistics in text or tables.
And 54% of adults reading below a 6th grade level.
Here are a couple of links:
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020025/index.asp
If you have better definitions or data, please share.
Looking at their upcoming initiative to cap their population in the constitution, temperament is a bit lacking right now.
"Tracks?? - that's sexist/racist/oppressive/ableist/classist/homophobic/discriminatory. And mean."
No society would plan for the K-12 and higher ed systems that we have. This article goes a long way to explaining how we got the one we have.
This is an excellent essay and there were no good old days of education anywhere for general populations.
It wasn't until St. Isidore of Seville's Fourth National Council of Toledo that cathedral schools became the norm to educate the clergy--not everyday people.
And of course Latin was the written language of the educated. All the liturgical paintings and statuary in churches was an attempt to educate common people visually.
Not until printing presses did vernacular reading material became available. But literacy stayed low.
Jumping ahead to think about H.G. Wells' education in England in the 1880s--it was a mish mash of private parent funded opportunities. Dewitt Clinton in the U.S. in the 1800s helped establish the idea of universal school. This is just to point out how FdB is correct. We have never had universal college ready schooling in the history of the world. These are just a few things off the top of my head there are certainly excellent histories to pursue this.
This is probably the least controversial FdB education post ever. That’s neither criticism nor compliment.
And yet, I can tell you what the response will be from certain quarters....
I just want to get back to a world where we produce bricklayers and carpenters again.
My husband was a carpenter. The math he could do in his head would have blown the top off the SATS, but he liked being a carpenter. He especially liked building staircases. He was also a big reader. H.S. grad. drafted to VN.
Math you do in your head isn't math but arithmetic. And that won't blow the top off the SATs.
o misspoke, I mean a lot of geometric figuring . I said math because I was making a comment abt the analytical skills of carpenters with angles and weight bearing for stair cases, etc. but shorthanded what I mean. Sorry to be unclear.
My 16-year-old son loves (and crushes) math. He thinks he will probably get some kind of Engineering degree in college. Like 4 of his six aunts and uncles and all four of his cousins. Funny. Anyhow, the other day he spent 3 hours working on his e-bike, came inside and said: "Wow, that felt like 30 minutes, not three hours". I said, "Dude, that's called the flow state, so if AI eats all the tech jobs, you will love being a skilled tradesman, and probably make more money."
I suspect the college for all era is coming to an abrupt end. We went to a new bookkeeper to do our taxes. We talked a bit about college. Our youngest is just finishing up a vascular imaging degree and her youngest is getting ready to go to college. He's majoring in baseball and ??? His mother is looking at $45K a year. Probably a good chunk of student loan debt too.
This is at a time that the middle-class white collar work...including STEM jobs look to be going away. I've got a kid with a software engineering degree working in food service. It's not all the job market, but I'm not so sure that what he's doing doesn't have just as much long term potential as working in a big company who's replacing coders with AI.
I sure wouldn't be encouraging my kids to go to college as the pathway to economic security anymore. I think it's going to go back to being a play place for the rich and a workplace for the top .01% in intelligence.
Because I am old (59), I remember the days before we started forcing all students to receive identical educations—educations that are far too academic for the interests and abilities of many kids. School systems used to have multiple programs to serve students’ differing needs and abilities.
For example, I attended an enormous (2100 kids in grades 10–12) public high school in a working-class rural community. In my graduating class of 700, only about a dozen of us went on to selective colleges. More graduates went into the military than to four-year colleges.
Our high school offered honors and regular classes, and its minimum requirements for graduation were not difficult. Students could graduate after two trimesters of Consumer Math, three years of English, two years of social studies, and one year of science electives (these classes could be pretty easy, for example Animal Behavior, which a friend passed by tying wheeled legos to a chick’s feet and “teaching” it to roller-skate). No further classes in math, science, or foreign languages were required.
Our high school also allowed students to leave campus after lunch and attend classes at a nearby vocational school. Other students left after lunch to go to paying jobs. Many students chose to participate in these programs.
This system seemed to work well for everyone. Of course, back then you could get an ok job with a high school diploma, even from a school with requirements as easy as those at my school. As I read over this comment, I’m realizing that my community and high school pretty much did exactly what Freddie has always recommended—allow students to choose a less-academic path if that works for them, but also ensure that everyone can lead a reasonably comfortable life, regardless of their academic achievements.
"... but also ensure that everyone can lead a reasonably comfortable life, regardless of their academic achievements."
That's the hard part. Freddie says politicians chose those policies that led to deindustrialisation etc. They didn't. It's the logic of the system and it made most Americans incredibly wealthy.
I had almost the same experience in h.s.
We want schools to fix stupid and you can't fix stupid - it's as simple as that.
"As late as the 19th century, when mass public schooling was beginning to take shape in Europe and America, the explicit and stated goal of elementary education was functional literacy and basic numeracy (enough to be a productive worker and citizen) while anything beyond that was understood to be for a different kind of person entirely. This “tracking” was not incidental; it was the point."
Sort of OT, but interesting how that worked out in practical terms. "Common Sense" was not a simple tract, but it sold in Colonial America like hotcakes, you'd think the printers were handing out free money.
Abraham Lincoln had a total of six weeks of formal schooling in his life, more or less, yet he was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker, leader or speaker. His memes such as "The Father of Waters flows again unvexed to the sea" are not the product of a smoothbrain, but are are still talked about today. He also was a highly successful lawyer before he became Abraham Lincoln.
And there were lots of people like Lincoln.
That's because intelligence was more widespread across the classes and less sorted for than now. Our meritocratic system is pretty good at promoting intelligence wherever it finds it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates may have grown in a poor neighbourhood of Baltimore during the crack epidemic from a father who might have had his intelligence ignored because he was Black but I bet you whatever you want that Ta-Nehisi's kids will have no problems achieving whatever educational level is warranted by their smarts. Maybe even above and beyond as I imagine Ta-Nehisi and his wife/partner won't skimp on private education etc.
"Our meritocratic system is pretty good at promoting intelligence wherever it finds it." I don't think that's especially true. Our system provides some "ins" for people able to discover and exploit them, but it does not actually filter for those people - it advances plenty of (variously) mediocre people and misses plenty of (variously) talented people.
The fact that SOME poor people manage to break into the intelligentsia is not strong evidence that the intelligentsia is finding and elevating talented poor people.
This is all aside from, say, disability, which can derail your ability to access resources regular people take for granted, without reflecting specifically on your intelligence or talent. In the US, where healthcare is tied to employment, a loss of one can cause a spiral of loss in both that has little to do with merit.
I'm not saying the entire US system is fair! I'm saying the school system will surface raw intellectual talent decently well.
I'm sure there must have been countless studies around that but the simple fact that Black people and nonwhites are now in the intelligentsia circles is proof that the educational system is a lot more meritocratic than it was before.
Also - the fact that people like GWB or Trump also graduate from top institutions doesn't mean those institutions aren't ferreting out intelligent poor people effectively. It just means they compromise and let in people on criteria other than intelligence, if they have money and power.
" it advances plenty of (variously) mediocre people and misses plenty of (variously) talented people."
Not so. Lots of data shows otherwise. You have a deeply flawed understanding of mediocre. Restriction of range hurts analysis.
"The fact that SOME poor people manage to break into the intelligentsia is not strong evidence that the intelligentsia is finding and elevating talented poor people."
The fact is that all or nearly all do.
Considering that I came up poor and know plenty of very smart people who did poorly in school, I'm inclined to not believe you when you say "The fact is that all or nearly all do." That seems absurd on face. If there is SOOOO much ready evidence for this, I encourage you to share it
.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6526425/
Ever worked for a lame manager? Are celebrities celebrated for their sterling intellect?
Celebrities get rich on noncognitive skills and lame!= stupid.
I think some of the problem comes from the fact that the people who talk about education, and who set policies for education, are almost universally people who were abnormally successful in education. So they don't have the perspective of all the people who didn't succeed.
I'm certainly one of them! School was always very easy for me. Success came naturally. When I didn't get as good a grade as I could, it was only because I hadn't worked hard enough or cared enough.
But because of our ideology of equality (which is good in many ways, certainly better than the racial caste system that preceded it!), most members of the intellectual class are incapable of accepting that differences in educational success can be natural.
I think I dodged that trap due to being homeschooled in a classical Christian humanist manner, with great attention paid to history and the breadth of human experience, and with a somewhat critical perspective on the various ideologies of modernity.
Also, most educational policy-makers have zero experience as classroom teachers. Which contributes to the educational romanticism.
I own a copy of Cult of Smart and it’s excellent - well argued and thoroughly legit cover-to-cover. But FWIW I saw the change unfold starting in the 80s. Teaching in LAUSD made for a close view. The rationale was strongly supported by the story of Jaime Escalante, whose astonishing success at the district’s Garfield HS was dramatized in the movie “Stand and Deliver”. A Bolivian immigrant who had taught math before coming to LoCali, he had single-handedly elevated math instruction at a typical big barrio high school and produced a crop of kids whose performance in AP calculus was so uncharacteristically strong that it raised suspicions of cheating. Re-testing was conducted and completely vindicated the students and their teacher.
That happened in the early 80s and the movie came out in ‘89. I started teaching that summer. I didn’t charge into it with that story in mind but it did provide a measure of inspiration over time, particularly since my students were a close match for his. In those days racist stereotyping was a venerable part of the picture, and the shunting of kids into voc ed was accurately viewed as a function of structural racism. Of course the economy was very different then, but raising expectations of academic achievement was a tack in line with Cali’s exceptionally good and remarkably affordable public higher education system. It was positioned to hold up its end of the bargain, having done so with great efficiency from the beginning of the post war era.
That’s a bit of context most are unaware of today, but I do think it renders a lot of clarity. Things are different now. I have a no regrets about my path through Cali’s public higher ed system in the 70s and 80s, but if I had to plot a future today I’d strongly consider becoming an electrician first and taking art classes later.
Actually the students did cheat.
And Escalante tracked like crazy.
Escalante taught at Garfield for some years before he was able to get AP calc going. It was an uphill battle and took time. Of course he didn’t manufacture a miracle -it took a long term effort. And yes, he selected for talent, and didn’t turn math-deficient students into geniuses. What he did do was identify capable kids who would’ve otherwise lacked opportunity. He then supplied excellent instruction and motivation, and never shied away from challenging them. All of that had previously been lacking and therefore had been beyond their reach.
The cheating allegations specifically arose from the fact that the students’ tests showed uncannily identical proofs. The allegations weren’t baseless. He had taught specific problem solutions and their work reflected that. I have also read within the last few years that students who were involved admitted to communicating about the problems, and the test administrators caught something fishy, which is to their credit and goes far toward legitimizing the assessment and their monitoring of the results. Nonetheless the students were re-tested under secure conditions and their pass-rate remained high.
The story was simplified for public consumption as a movie - quite effectively. That doesn’t diminish Escalante’s achievement or alter the fact that he was able to raise student performance and expectations. He also got institutional support after an administrative change and talented younger teachers helped expand the program.
I have subscribed to FdB for years, partly for his bracing honesty about the range of educational performance and test-score results. I taught for 35 years and am well aware of it. But something that gets lost in the debate (invariably by armchair quarterback commenters) to which he and Cult of Smart contribute much of value is the reality that, though there will always be an array of academic performance (or relative performance on a much bigger variety of tasks), there will also be wide variability among students, schools, teachers, and the specific local cultures that produce them.
In the case of Escalante and Garfield High what was missing was the effort and structure that would afford expression of it. It wasn’t a case of manufacturing smart kids out of dumb ones. It was an example of providing an opportunity to allow smart kids to show what they could do. That’s the whole point. Escalante was ‘old school’ and knew that, on a campus with 2500+ kids, and despite appearances to the contrary that reflected an unambitious institutional approach, there were bound to be capable performers. He was proven right.
The pendulum was on the other side then, and the push to place working class kids of all stripes into voc ed had a class-prejudice impetus - it reflected broad common tendencies and wasn’t simply a racist plot. It reflected a disdain for the great unwashed of all kinds and affected ‘ethnic’, hillbilly, okie and poor white kids in great numbers also. The pendulum has swung and now the tendency is to push too many toward college. Part of the impetus for the change is the budgetary savings to be had by closing shop classes that entail high overhead and liability costs. Schools face relentless performance-based funding scrutiny and wood shop doesn’t provide much bang that way.