Make American education rigorous again

Now that school choice is being touted not only by Republicans but also by Democrats, after public school students’ test scores took a nosedive as a result of school districts’ COVID-19 policies, it is a good moment to reintroduce rigor to American education writ large.  

I have been a college-level writing instructor at several universities, ranging from an elite ivy league institution to middling state schools, for more than a decade. Most of my students have been bright, hard-working and ambitious. But most of them could not reliably construct grammatical sentences.

This inability to write at what was once considered a fifth-grade level is now the norm among students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, races and ethnicities. It is also the predictable result of the overemphasis on self-expression at the expense of excellence that has been driving the decline of American K-12 and higher education for decades.

Educational “experts” who purport to know what is best for children have long presided over increasing illiteracy and innumeracy, and a widening achievement gap. These so-called experts, beginning with those in the academy, are impervious to ever-mounting evidence that the more we do what they prescribe the worse things get.

To fix the manifold problems in American education and in the broader culture that schools and universities are producing, we will need to recover two related ideas that are anathema to today’s educational establishment: First, that mastery of a subject or skill is recognizable and worthy of praise; second, that the discipline of mastery (which should be common) is not the opposite of creativity (which is rare), but a prerequisite for it.

Educational experts have come up with a lot of sophisticated-sounding reasons for what amounts to dumbing education down. Rote learning, memorization and homework are all out of vogue. Supposedly, these ancient instructional tools perpetuate classism and racism. It turns out, however, that the achievement gap between students of different classes and races increases, not decreases, as educational standards decline.

Most of my students did not know basic grammar and punctuation because they were never drilled and tested on these concepts. If they did not absorb these patterns by osmosis (that is, if they were not both inclined toward lots of reading and sufficiently privileged to have access to books) then they did not absorb them at all.

My Italian American grandmother, by contrast, who attended Philadelphia public schools in the 1930s and had parents who spoke broken English and no books in her home, could reliably capitalize and punctuate basic sentences. This would put her in the top 10 percent of the hundreds of students I taught over the years, at least half of whom had college-educated parents. My grandmother was not smarter than most of these kids, nor was she of a higher socioeconomic class.

But she had attended school when educational discourse innocently and rightly assumed that objective standards were just as applicable to and achievable for racially diverse, socio-economically disadvantaged and English-as-a-second-language students as anyone else. When my grandmother was a kid, it had not yet occurred to anyone to pretend that such standards have no merit just because it is harder to help kids without as many resources to meet them.

If acknowledging that excellence exists and can be measured is the first step toward making American education rigorous again, recognizing that mastery precedes (not inhibits) creativity is the second.

Great emphasis on fostering children’s creativity has suffused educational discourse since the 1970s, when the late Maria Montessori’s idea that “play is the work of childhood” took root. That is fine for very young children. But fostering creativity at the expense of mastery beyond the age of 9 or 10, when children should begin to engage higher-order thinking, is counter-productive.

Before I met them, many of my college students had been exposed mostly to writing assignments that focused on emotional self-expression, not rational argumentation. Partly as a result, most of them were not only poor writers but also underdeveloped thinkers.

For those few among us who are true creatives, rigorous instruction in syntax, grammar and punctuation feed the craft, not detract from it. This is as true in other areas as it is in writing. As any top-tier jazz musician can explain, to break rules productively, you must first know the rules and how to follow them.

This seems like common sense. Yet, for decades now, educational elites have been making things worse for everyone (most acutely for poor and minority students) while insisting that they are making them better.

We could have spent the past 50 years expanding access to traditionally rigorous educational standards to truly include everyone. Instead, we spent them deferring to people who tore those standards apart, replaced them with counter-productive nonsense and asked us to pretend that their naked emperor was dressed in silks.

Any return to rigor begins with acknowledging that education is about steady soldiers finding the most effective ways to help students meet enduring and objective standards — not whiny revolutionaries insisting that such standards do not exist.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.