Parents are used to hearing kids complain about having to take algebra. "It's really boring, and what good will it do me anyway?" they ask. Now the kids have an ally in Gerald Bracey, an education consultant, who thinks that forcing most kids to study algebra is a disagreeable waste of time.
In an article in the Washington Post (June 12, 1992), Bracey points out that American adults seldom use algebra in their daily lives or their work: A recent study of 1400 jobs showed that 78 percent of them did not require any algebra. And people who have a job that, like Bracey' s, requires algebra don't have to waste several years learning it. "I could have learned all I needed to know," Bracey says, "in a month or so. Instead, I spent three numbing years, two in high school and one in college, factoring quadratic equations and solving useless problems .... "
Sounds reasonable, but I wonder if we'd want to limit education to what is "useful." I bet 100 percent of the kids who learn nursery rhymes never use them in their work; few ever need to sing or dance in their offices or factories. And how many of them use the language of William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens or Frederick Douglass in writing memos?
Bracey says he could have learned all the algebra he needed in a month. Well, if we looked at 75 percent of our jobs and narrowed the curriculum to what people need to know in order to do them, we could probably end school by second grade. But who says we should determine what students learn simply by what industry needs? We'd save a lot of money, but we'd have a society of ignoramuses and not one that could support democratic institutions for very long.
Bracey is ignoring something else, too. Maybe American workers are not using algebra (and other math) in their jobs because that's the way their jobs are set up. According to Ira Magaziner, chairman of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, much of U.S. business has decided to compete in international markets by pursuing a low-skills, low-wage strategy for workers.
In part, this choice reflects employers' belief that American workers couldn't handle a Japanese-style workplace where highly skilled jobs require workers to know math and use it. But this is a vicious circle: When employers expect hired hands who will do no-brain jobs, that's what they get. When they expect something more, there is pressure to meet their expectations. Maybe the fact that so few of our workers use math is a symptom of something wrong with the way our workplace is structured rather than something wrong with teaching algebra to our youngsters.
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There are some things you can never win on. Recently, the Bureau of the Census sent out a news release announcing a report on school enrollment among African-American, Hispanic and white students. Its headline read, "One third of all students 15 to 17 years old fall behind in school." That's a real grabber and of course these figures were widely quoted as more evidence for the failure of our schools. But they have nothing to do with school success or failure.
A decade ago, when most schools had automatic, or social, promotion, all of the students were at grade level. At the end of the school year, they were pushed on to the next grade, no matter how little they had learned, because it was believed that leaving them behind was cruel. But then people started saying that some students might benefit from an extra year in a grade and, indeed, that it was cruel to promote kids who would not be able to keep up. So school districts started holding some kids back again, and -- Eureka! -- we now see that one-third of all 15- to 17-year-olds are not at grade level.
If we want to fix these figures, all we have to do is go back to social promotion. It's too bad that we can't take care of the real problems in our schools so easily.
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When reformers talk about what's wrong with the public schools - and who's responsible for fixing it -- teachers often show up as the heavies. Most parents, we are told, would move heaven and earth to get the best education possible for their kids, and teachers are the roadblock. They just don't care enough about the kids they teach.
For what it's worth, the kids don't agree with this assessment. In "Voices from the Classroom," a recent survey of high school students, sponsored by Sylvan Learning Systems and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, a big majority of the kids -- 71 percent -- said they thought their teachers were doing a good or excellent job.
The kids were less enthusiastic about the contribution of parents. They said that only 14 percent of the parents in their neighborhood were "heavily involved" in their children's education; 44 percent were "somewhat involved" and 30 percent were "rarely" or "not at all involved." Students were not talking about taking time off work to volunteer, either. The biggest contribution that parents could make, they thought, was to "help all of their children with their homework." Setting rules to make sure homework got done was also near the top.
Teachers have a big responsibility for student achievement, as do the students themselves. But parents have a responsibility, too, and whatever other grownups say, the kids who answered this survey did not think enough parents are meeting their obligations.