IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
383
its peculiar love-hate relationship with the K-12 system, complaining
about that system's products while contributing in myriad ways to keep–
ing those problems unsolved.
Now let me briefly turn the tables and mention five ways in which
what's going on in higher education affects the K-12 system for the worse.
Most damaging today is the abandonment of entrance standards. I'm
certainly not opposed to everyone having a shot at a college education, nor
to the financial aid that makes that economically possible. But I oppose the
impact on high school exit standards of the understanding that everyone
can go to college. The great tragedy of open admissions is not what it does
to the colleges but how it fatally undermines efforts to reform the schools.
The late Albert Shanker was particularly eloquent on this point. He said the
kids want to know
if
it counts before they take learning it seriously. And
if the whole world is signaling to them that it doesn't really count, that
you'll be admitted anyway, that we'll employ you anyway, put yourself in
the place of a typical sixteen-year-old on a Tuesday evening, trying to
decide whether to stay home and re-work that lab report and get an early
start on his history paper, or go out with his friends? Well, sixteen-year–
olds, in their own odd way, are rational beings. They go through a kind of
rational calculus, asking does it matter, does it count, does it really make
any difference? If the real world signals that it doesn't really count, how do
you think they're going to spend their evenings? That is what I think the
colleges are doing to the schools. They signal that you're welcome even if
you didn't learn anything in school.
Second is the ripple effect of the university's intellectual and curricular
fashions. Every idea that drips down through the academic limestone even–
tually creates stalactites within the K-12 system. The postmodern enterprise
has infected what's taught in third grade. Where do
"fuzzy"
math, coopera–
tive learning, whole language reading, and "history from the victim's
standpoint" come from? Where did those wretched national history stan–
dards come from? From a university campus, of course. Everything that
happens in higher education sooner or later makes its way into third grade.
Third is the disaster of teacher training. Keep the numbers in mind:
there are upwards of a hundred thousand education degrees a year award–
ed by U.S. colleges and universities. This is the major source of teachers
and school administrators. Most of them are just awful, for the reasons and
data I've given. There are a few partial, happy exceptions. I think in defer–
ence to our hosts it's worth pointing out that Boston University has
something approaching a good school of education, in a desert of good
schools of education around the country.
The fourth problem that is trickling from universities into the schools
is permissiveness with respect to behavior and morality. If it's taken for
