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By Thomas Sowell
Menlo-Atherton High School in
an affluent California community is considered to be very good
academically, at least by current standards, in an era of dumbed-down
education. Yet its problems are all too typical of what is wrong
with American education today.
A gushing account of the free breakfast
program and other giveaways to lower-income students who attend
this high school recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle,
while the Wall Street Journal presented a sympathetic account
of the school's attempt to teach science to students of very disparate
abilities in the same classroom.
Even more revealing, the villains
in this story -- as seen by both the educators and by the reporter
for the Wall Street Journal -- are those parents who want their
children to get the best education they can, instead of being
used as guinea pigs for social and educational experiments.
Creating a science class that included
students of very different levels of ability and motivation was
one of those experiments. These disparities were especially great
in this particular school, since its students come from both highly-educated,
high-income families in Silicon Valley and low-income Hispanic
and other minority families from the wrong side of the local freeway.
Moreover, they were fed into the high school from their respective
neighborhood schools with very different standards.
The science class turned out to
be a disaster. While the principal admired the good intentions
behind it, he also admitted "it was almost impossible to
pull off in real life. The disparity was too great." Yet
the science teacher blamed the ending of this experiment on affluent
parents who "really didn't give it a chance" and the
principal spoke of the "heat" he got from such parents,
who "thought their kids were being held back by the other
kids, that their children's chances for MIT or Stanford were being
hampered."
This was seen as a public relations
problem, rather than as a perfectly legitimate complaint from
parents who took their responsibilities for their children's education
seriously -- more seriously than the "educators" who
tried to be social workers or world-savers.
In a school where 40 percent of
the children are Hispanic and 38 percent are white, sharp income
and cultural divisions translate into racial or ethnic divisions
plainly visible to the naked eye. This also arouses the ideological
juices and emotional expressions of resentment, both inside and
outside the school.
Stanford University's school of
education is reluctant to send its graduates to teach at Menlo-Atherton
High School because the latter doesn't make enough effort to overcome
"inequalities" and uses politically incorrect "tracking"
by ability "to keep affluent kids protected from the other
kids."
In other words, a school that takes
in fifteen-year-odds from radically different backgrounds is supposed
to come up with some miracle that can make them all equal in ability,
despite fifteen years of prior inequality in education and upbringing.
Somehow, there are always magic solutions out there, just waiting
to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt.
Make-believe equality at the high
school level fools nobody, least of all the kids. White kids at
Menlo-Atherton refer to the non-honors courses as "ghetto
courses," while a black kid who enrolled in honors courses
had his friends demand to know why he was taking "that white-boy
course."
If you are serious about education,
then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to
give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished
from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or
"tracking" -- so hated by the ideological egalitarians
-- is one of the best ways of doing that.
If you were a black kid in a Harlem
school back in the 1940s, and you had both the desire and the
ability to get a first-rate education, it was there for you in
the top-ability class. The kids who were not interested in education,
or who preferred to spend their time fighting or clowning around,
were in other classes and did not hold back the ones who were
ready to learn.
Our egalitarian dogmas prevent that
today, destroying low-income and minority youngsters' opportunities
for real equality. A mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste,
especially when it is the only avenue to a better life.
Sowell is a syndicated columnist. Readers may write to him at Creators Syndicate, 5777 West Century Blvd., Suite 800, Los Angeles, CA 90045. His web site is www.tsowell.com.
This column appeared in the Fayetteville Observer on April 16, 2000.
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