They say that there are two kinds of lies: lies, and “damned lies.” In particular, I think the uses of tests and “research data” can be a particularly specious form of a “lie.”

John Stossel gave a test to a Belgian and an American classroom and the Belgians did much better. What exactly were the questions? Did they line up with the different curriculum of the American and Belgians classes? Where did the American students do well? Where not? The Belgian students? The test was in math, science, history, or reading?

None of this we know, and all of it I would like to know before coming to any conclusion.

I have been a teacher for some 13 years, and I have also taught in some of the best and worst schools in California – a state in the United States known for drastic disparities of wealth and academic achievement between its inhabitants. In California one can find the children of Stanford or UCLA professors, and the children of farm workers from Mexico who themselves cannot read or write. Can one really generalize about so disparate and diverse a population? Overall, the Caflifornian public school children read and write at almost the lowest levels in the nation, statistically speaking, above only Mississippi. But if you look at the public schools in Palo Alto, Piedmont, Irvine, and La Jolla, you will find some of the highest achieving public schools in the nation. It is within that latter range of schools that Foothill Technology High School finds itself, according to test scores (although one would not expect that in Ventura, CA).

So does that mean automatically to be in a California public school means to be unable to read or write well? In Marin County, as well as in Compton? Is it not that simple?

There are those students in Asia who supposedly stay in school until 5 every evening and then take special cram classes all weekend. They take these incredibly stressful tests at 15 which supposedly dictate their course in life – the prestigious Tokyo University, or off to auto repair class. They talk about how these kids can do geometry in sixth grade, etc. etc.

I am not so sure. Or perhaps if I think that these students are often more advanced than their American counterparts, that is not true for all students all the time. And there are plenty of American students who are plugged-in big time to the academic pressure cooker of high stakes tests and pressure to excel.

I would be loath to make excuses for the American public school system. In many ways, I am a strong critic of “the system” and know its flaws intimately from long experience. Too many parents look at school as a glorified babysitting service and deliver their children to schools “to be educated” – putting it all on the school, and neglecting the fact that the first and foremost teacher or any child is the parent. Too many public schools have overwhelmed and mediocre or worse teachers in them that never were the most dynamic or brilliant that America had to offer in the first place. A true education costs blood, sweat, and tears – a true effort of the soul and heart, as well as the mind. Many (most?) Americans, students and teachers alike, are simply not up for that. The result too often is a pretty mediocre education.

And the American culture, generally, is not over-friendly towards intellectuals and the life of the intellect. We live in an age of rap music, “pimp your ride,” the importance of image, Hollywood movies, sports and celebrity worship, clothing and style - and the ubiquitous worship of Mammon. Not exactly the kind of thing where reading books and thinking deep thoughts are valued. Last night chaperoning at the MORP dance I sat there watching hundreds of students from all three high schools in one auditorium over three hours, and I speculated how few of them were really up for studying at the Advanced Placement level. It was pretty damn obvious to me that most students were interested in the social scene, their friends, the beat of the music, the football game, the cute members of the opposite sex, fighting with their parents – the party, the drinking, who hooked up with who, etc. etc. I could look the kid up and down and see them in class or in the quad during lunch. A pretty small percentage of them choose to take the hardest classes their schools have to offer, and I think most of the time it is because they know it will be hard and require sacrifice – and that will get in the way of the other non-academic things they really want to get done in their lives.

And it is not really about academic talent only. For example, how many non-AP students are willing to give "Advanced Placement" time and energy to their lower level classes? It really is about priorities - and school and learning and excellence not really being a priority. The blood, sweat, and the tears that a real education costs and requires. The sacrifice! For most, the benefit is not worth the cost. It is inconvenient. It is "hard."

And this is pretty representative of the country as a whole, I believe.

If you go to UCLA or UC Berkeley, you will find that almost a majority of the students are Asian and Asia American. It seems that that culture prizes academics much more than mainstream American one does. In America is an AP student a “geek,” a “loser,” a “dork”? Is not that what high achieving Foothill Technology High School is full of, supposedly?

Even if you had hardcore and highly skilled teachers in every American classroom, how many American kids are really up for the effort that it would take to learn truly and deeply? Almost the entire life focused on that effort….? How many American adults live that way? How many parents read more than their children? Or is it pretty much a TV and sit com culture out there, for both parents and children? "Happiness is a new plasma big screen, high definition TV"?

On the other hand, you want to tell me that there are not plenty of “waste of time” students just clocking the hours until they can leave in schools throughout Asia and Europe? The kid who has failed forever, and who has found that “school is just not for me”?

I suspect many foreign schools do not have the mandate from their societies that American ones do: you must have excellence AND equality. Shuffle off many of the lower achievers at 15 years of age who do not excel on standardized exams into non-college tracks, and suddenly you do have a group of incredibly high achievers that can soar at high speed through their studies. On the other hand, there exists almost the expectation nowadays in America that every child should have a “college prep” education. We are disheartened when the results of that are less than ideal. No American students should ever be “average,” or even lower. In America, for example, it goes against the American democratic ethos even to supposed that some students might be "a waste of time"! Everyone can succeed academically – “no child left behind.”

I suspect that many other countries focus much more on their high achievers and almost ignore the lower achievers, when it comes time to examine how things are going academically with the next generation. In America, the focus is on the low achievers and why they are not up with everyone else.

In India, for example, what percentage of that nation's students study English and engineering in elite schools to participate in the global economy? How many students are utterly impoverished, hardly ever have gone to school, beg for a living with their families, and will never be anything but poor and illiterate?

Moreover, I look around in several schools over more than a decades and I see the high achieving American students I have had as students. Many of them have been almost awe inspiring, having left me ashamed at my pathetic self at their age. Incredibly talented students who have always prized highly the life of the mind - whether in school or not. They are truly impressive!

A cynic might look at the mass of high schoolers dancing to the driving techno beat at the MORP dance and see a throng of hormonally mindless teens frenetically grinding up and down and against one another - with Principal Joe Bova on the alert for any instances of "freak dancing" that might occur.

The untrained eye might look on the dance and see little else than adolescents and mating rituals. But I could see Brandon Burkley walking around the edges, and he is a prince of a young man - America has little to fear with such as him up and coming. There was Kate Lairmore dancing by herself on the fringes, doing her unique belly dancing style - she is about as brilliant, sensitive, and idealistic as any America has produced in its past. There was Shane walking hither and thither - she planned and put the whole dance on, the unnamed hero of the evening.

On the other hand, I could see several young people clearly on their way to unhappy futures. Years ago I used to work with the prison population, and these teens fairly wreaked of that subculture already. They were going "the other way." Come back in twenty years, and more than a few persons at that MORP dance will be career criminals, subsumed in prison culture, gang tattoos, drug dealing, and "shot calling." It was not for no reason that the "powers that be" had two police officers lurking in the background and working the dance, and to not have had the police at such a dance would have been negligent. So it goes. (One student confided to me, "I feel better knowing they [the police] are here.")

But more than a few attendees at that MORP dance will be college professors and professionals with advanced degrees.

A complex mix of good and bad, all in all - punctuated by plenty of "middle." Is it really that different in Belgium?

Jake, Catherine, Tristan, Jeff, Rachel, Makena, Robert - my gut instinct tells me that students in other countries are essentially no “smarter” than them. By no means would I call any of them "stupid." And they are as "American" as any high school junior that cannot pass the California High School Exit Exam! Inferior to "Belgian" students?

I watch my AP students groan under the strain of their class work and seek for sleep in unused corners here and there on weekends. The best and most ambitious of them don’t really have much more they could put into their studies, and I strongly suspect the case is not much different in Japan or France – the precocious and ambitious young scholar “going places” in their life, and the huge demands their teachers make on them that results in a strong fundamental base of an education. There are PLENTY of American students like this. Plenty!

And there are plenty of Neanderthal Americans who cannot tell you what the Bill of Rights is for, or what caused the Civil War – scenes showed in Stossel’s interpretation of public schools. This is, no doubt, true. “Mouth breathers” who see little above the “hear and now” of pop culture and instant gratification – Tristan put it well in one of his blogsite postings about kids who ignore the potential of an education and want to be a “gangsta rather than a docta.” But if I went into a Tokyo video arcade and took the average Japanese student at random, how strong would that kid be? Are there no substandard Japanese students? No “troubled kids” with “substance abuse” issues? "Criminal subcultures" and "youth gangs"?

More to the point, is it perhaps that the lower kids in the United States get much more focus, and on the higher students in other countries are where the priorities are place? In trying to have equality for all, does the American system automatically result in less excellence overall? How about the amount of money America spends on special education – for students who will never be academic superstars?

And if American schools are so full of “stupid” students, why is it that every year so many of the Nobel Prize awards are won by American professors? Is it true that perhaps there are just as many (if not more?) brilliant students in American schools as in Belgian ones? If you take the brightest students out of Harvard or Princeton and you compare them against the best students in the best Belgian schools, what would happen? If you compared the American and Belgian universities themselves, what would you have?

All I am saying is that one test given to one class in Belgium and New Jersey is not enough to draw sweeping conclusions about both countries and the academic potential of an entire nation’s youth.

John Stossel is a journalist with a pronounced ideological bias, and he has authored a show full of half truths to be thrown out there as the full explanation for what is wrong with American schools and how one can “fix them” – all in forty minutes. I found much of what he said to be true in his examination of the American public school system – much more than most of my fellow teachers did. (I am totally in favor of merit pay for teachers and sharply reducing the power of teacher’s unions!) But I found way too many “half truths” that attempted to simplify and generalize on something not prone to that quick and easy treatment.

To make a TV program like that is to be in control of it from beginning to end. What evidence did he not use? As Sontag says, “To frame is to exclude.” What footage and data did he uncover that he ignored because it did not fit his thesis? I mistrust his show.

Ultimately, it was a creation of television. It was full of explosive and sensationalistic rhetoric that belied the complexity and ambiguity of real life. It attempted to define, explain, and rehabilitate a hugely complex phenomenon between commercial breaks within the space of one single hour.

To reduce the American educational system to “stupid American schools” producing “stupid American students” must ultimately be rejected. Half-truth, thy name is John Stossel (and TV generally).

It is just not that simple.

Mr. Geib
February 11, 2006