Murray’s Truths

His big point is this: American education suffers from a surfeit of romanticism. It is too idealistic and pursues goals it will not and cannot attain. By blindly believing that all students will be able to achieve at high academic levels, and by ignoring reams of facts that belie such a notion, the educational system does significant harm to the students it purports to help. The individual talents and aspirations of millions of young people have been sacrificed on educational romanticism’s altar.

One of the truths Murray believes the romantics don’t accept–but must–is that too many people are going to college.

That higher education is overly inclusive is certainly counterintuitive, especially when there exists such widespread agreement that the more Americans in college (which Murray defines as a four-year residential institution) the better. Politicians spanning the hues from navy to vermilion strive to make university education widely accessible, and the country’s high school curricula typically have, as their goal, the production of graduates who matriculate at college.

Murray dissents. He finds profoundly mistaken the prevailing college-or-bust mindset. For starters, it ignores the blatant fact that millions of high school students have absolutely no desire to attend college, and that their professional goals are in no way furthered by sitting through professorial soliloquies on Milton or calculus.

For many such students–teenagers who have recognized that their talents and interests are not of the academic variety–high school becomes a terrible bore and unbearable waste of time. And some 30 percent of them make the decision to drop out, forgo a diploma, and get a job.

But what of the many students who do graduate from high school and go on to enroll in a four-year university? There were 1.5 million of them in 2005. Murray writes that many don’t belong in college because they aren’t capable of doing college-level work. Thus, a predictable result:

Of those who entered college in 1995, only 58 percent had gotten their B.A. five academic years later. Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half of the 14 percent eventually get their B.A.s, about a third of all those who enter college leave without one.

Those who leave have, of course, squandered precious time, and many are newly saddled with mounds of debt, for which they have nothing to show.

Another logical, foreseeable result of an inflation in the number of those who attend college is grade inflation, which leads to degree inflation. By pushing into college those students who don’t want to go, don’t need to go, and aren’t prepared to go, our educational system has produced scads of people who possess college diplomas of rising flaccidity.

To wit, in July, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “The Declining Value of Your College Degree,” which detailed that “the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor’s degree, adjusted for inflation, didn’t rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level.” Certainly there are sundry culprits here, but the proliferation of meaningless B.A.s doesn’t help.

Of course, this trend is more debilitating for those who don’t possess college degrees, even flaccid ones. Now it has become common for employers to require of all job applicants a bachelor’s degree, regardless of whether the responsibilities of the position in question actually require a college education–have anything at all to do with a college education–or not. Those high-school graduates who, after evaluating their professional goals, decided that attending a vocational school or community college made sense may be well qualified for certain jobs from which they are nonetheless peremptorily excluded. So they trudge off to four-year institutions, and the cycle continues.

Murray’s diagnosis of America’s everyone-to-college romanticism is spot on–as is his assertion, later in Real Education, that America is inadequately educating its most talented pupils, as well as other suggestions about expanding educational choice. But his diagnosis of the everyone-can-learn romanticism–namely, that many American students, despite improvements in their K-12 schooling, can never make appreciable academic gains–is less spot-on.

Let’s start with what Murray gets right on this point. That we “do not live in Lake Wobegon,” that “half of children are below average,” is incontrovertibly true. Incontrovertibly untrue, as Murray also points out, is the romantic notion that all or most pupils can be academic high-achievers. That the No Child Left Behind Act requires every student–100 percent–to be “proficient” in mathematics and reading by 2014 is fantastical stuff, accomplished only if state governments set their individual definitions of “proficiency” at subterranean levels (which many have been busily doing). But here’s the problem. Just because 50 percent of children will always be below average, it does not follow that the average itself cannot be shifted–that what it means to be “average” cannot be substantially improved. And it does not follow that a lot of students in dismal, depressing, decaying public schools could not be learning a lot more than they currently are.

Murray believes that this argument–“the schools are so bad that low-ability students can learn a lot more even if their ability is unchanged”–is “at the heart of the educational romanticism that pervades American education.”

His first salvo against it is a history of the academic improvement of low-achievers. “There is a point,” he writes, “in every developed country at which children who are below average in their underlying academic ability make a great leap forward in their academic achievement: when they start to go to school.”

In the United States, after universal education was established, academic gains quickly diminished. Murray musters lots of data to prove that, since the 1970s, America has seen no significant improvement in the academic achievement of its students, and that to expect such improvement in the future is unwise.

Yet it is rather odd to look backward when making a case for what can and cannot be accomplished going forward. The fact is that America’s modern public schools–their basic structure, the composition of their staffs, their curricula–are much the same as their ’70s counterparts. Public schools were inefficiently designed 40 years ago, and they remain the same today, sputtering educational Apple IIs, the obsolescence of which is still ferociously protected by those interests (teachers’ unions, for example) that benefit from it.

If we can begin to reform the rotten structure that undergirds American education, why is it foolhardy to believe that good results will follow? It further puzzles when Murray, after estimating that about 11 percent of the nation’s students attend class in inner-city schools, and then figuring that “less than 10 percent of all K-12 students” attend “the worst schools,” claims that even if we rescued every one of those pupils from their dreadful environments, it “would only tweak the national numbers.” This assumes that the only students receiving sub-par educations are those in ramshackle, inner-city classrooms, which is a bit much to swallow. Are we really to believe that every pupil in suburban (and rural) public schools is receiving a top-flight education and achieving at the peak of his ability?

Murray writes that he supports vouchers and charter schools–public schools that frequently have non-unionized staffs and are freed from much district-level bureaucracy–but not because these innovations improve the academic achievement of their students. He notes that private schools and charter schools offer real advantages “in curricula that typically provide more substance in subjects like history, geography, literature, and civics,” and they “often provide supportive intellectual environments for hard-working students who, in public schools, are often subjected to peer pressure not to study.”

Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that so many private and charter schools have indeed worked academic miracles with formerly low-achieving students, I wonder why Murray thinks it good that these schools offer varied curricula, more educational substance, and supportive intellectual environments if (as he writes) none of this will ever improve the academic test scores “among low-ability students who would otherwise go to normal public schools.”

All of which returns us to his point that “at the heart of the educational romanticism that pervades American education” is the belief that low-ability students can learn much more than they are currently. Murray is either right or wrong here, depending on his statement’s circumstance.

If he means to derogate educational romantics’ taking the belief too far, as they often do–when they try to push all students to college, or when they expect that every pupil can pass a high-school exit exam, or when they demand all students be “proficient” by 2014–then Murray’s point is a sharp one. But if his statement is meant to suggest that many youngsters of low academic ability are not being educationally shortchanged and written off–that they’re not challenged by their teachers to achieve at academic levels they could reach, that they’re not capable of learning basic academic skills, such as how to read and write and do simple math, without which one is lost, or that they’re academically hopeless–then this one of Murray’s conclusions is simply untrue.

Educational romanticism deserves no pity. Let us be wary, though, of educational defeatism, our approach to which must be similarly merciless.

Liam Julian, a writer and editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.