RALEIGH – Remember when local politicians and school officials in Wake County defended their forced-busing policies by arguing that Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s lower test scores reflected the inevitable results of re-segregation? Remember when they attributed Wake’s higher performance among minority and low-income students to their socioeconomic target? Remember when the state and national opinion leaders lionized Wake’s self-styled courage and castigated protesting parents as racist troglodytes?
Uh, never mind. According to the latest scores, minority and low-income students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, where forced busing is now largely absent, are now performing at the same level as similar students in Wake, where forced busing remains the law.
This is hardly the first time that a highly touted educational “breakthrough” in North Carolina has turned out to be far less in substance than the initial marketing would lead one to suggest. My favorite example, which I never tire of repeating, is the 1999 press conference where then-Gov. Jim Hunt attributed improvement in North Carolina performance on the National Assessment of Education Program that year in part to the benefits of his Smart Start early-childhood program.
The reporters dutifully scribbled down the governor’s claims and repeated them. Only later, thanks to the urging of a pesky Raleigh think tank, did they think to do the math. The NAEP scores were for 4th and 8th-graders. Not a single participant in a Smart Start-funded preschool program would have been old enough to take the NAEP test in question. Unless Gov. Hunt was suggesting that the younger braniacs, heads chock full of learnin’ from their high-quality preschool experience, were tutoring their older siblings, his claim was simply impossible.
Everyone’s guilty of jumping on bandwagons from time to time. It’s human nature. We tend to notice evidence that fits our preconceived notions about what is true and how things work. We tend not to notice contrary evidence, or to subject a new discovery or trend to sufficient scrutiny before declaring a public-policy case closed.
There’s something to be said for good, old-fashioned conservatism in such situations. I don’t mean political conservatism a la Reagan or Thatcher in this instance. I mean the conservatism of caution, of treating experience and tradition as sound guides for consideration and action. It’s obviously not logical to conclude that just because an argument relies on accumulated experience or tradition, it must be true. Conventional wisdom gets overturned. However, accumulated experience and tradition help us to assess probabilities.
In education policy, the conventional wisdom is not, in fact, based on experience and tradition. They are often seen as the vestiges of a previous era of ill-informed rote learning, classroom authoritarianism, and severe discipline. Today’s conventional wisdom is that teachers should enable, not command; that children should construct their own knowledge, not receive it from those in the know; that the core curriculum of the past is little but an arbitrary list of facts and works from privileged white males; and that technology, teamwork, and gimmickry should replace lecture, repetition, and testing as the indispensable tools of effective instruction.
Most of these ideas come from educational philosophers with sharp wits, sharp tongues, and dull minds. They are not based on sound research or a coherent explanation of how and why children should learn. Although many students will perform adequately or better regardless of how poorly they are taught and assessed, others flounder in schools based on the twaddle that so many educators are taught in universities where the likes of John Dewey and Jean Piaget are venerated, not ridiculed.
There are contrary trends, thank goodness. Although it has many (fixable) faults, North Carolina’s testing program has at least focused attention squarely on outcomes. Some districts and schools have responded by implementing what works, not what is peddled in education schools. Successful charter, private, and home schools usually hew to a more traditional line. More parents should be allowed the opportunity to explore these options for their children without severe financial penalty.
As for Wake County, it ought to end the current practice of manipulating school enrollments to engineer a preferred socioeconomic outcome, and instead rededicate itself to effective instruction of all students entrusted to its care. It’s not that Charlotte-Mecklenburg has the answer – both systems’ high-school students continue to score abysmally. It’s just that Wake clearly doesn’t have the answer, either.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.