The Most Important Race—We’re Losing

Imagine that many of the world’s developed and emerging nations agreed to
compete in a yearlong auto race. The race will cover all sorts of terrain and
climates in widely separated global venues. Our team would be selected by
political leaders in the nation’s capital from people nominated by every state.
Imagine that Team USA would be the first team to settle on an all purpose vehicle
for the race.

All of the competitors but Team USA chose all purpose and reliable late-model
SUVs for their vehicle based on the varying course conditions where normal over-
the-road cars could not be as successful. Team USA chose a modified version of
the Ford Model T. While their choice was scorned by their competition, Team
USA said that they were the real experts and they would win the race easily.

They decided on the Model T based on its reputation for being easy to work on and
repair. They added a bunch of features which they deemed necessary for the race.
These included an air-conditioned cockpit, a complete set of the latest instruments
to measure every aspect of vehicle performance, a state of the art GPS system plus
additional crew members to monitor the gauges and computer readouts. Team
USA was very positive about having the best vehicle in the race and couldn’t wait
for the competition to begin.

The race is to cover 25,000 miles over one year. Only the first 5 teams would be
awarded prizes. At the end of the first week the leading teams were Finland,
Singapore, China, India and Russia. Team USA was far back because their 50,000
pound modified Model T experienced 100 tire blowouts and the top speed on level
ground was 10 miles an hour due to the immense weight dragging on the relatively
tiny Ford engine.

Day after day Team USA fell further and further behind. They took to announcing
progress against lower and lower targets to make their failing performance look
better than it was. This was successful in fooling most of the people. The race
ended when the first five teams had finished. Team USA was about 200 days
behind the leaders based on their average speed to date.
The Point

The race story is an analog to the performance of American K-12 education versus
our global competition. The modified Model T was chosen because it is a hundred
year old design just as the progressive philosophy of our education system is a
century old. While there have been lots of added changes in curricula; names,
advanced education degrees, best practices, response to intervention, etc. they all
are consistent with the constructivist, discovery beliefs of the progressive ideology.
As in the race story, the performance of the constructivist/discovery methods is
such that the education of students is much slower and never reaches the robust
levels of the competition that are using higher performance methods and curricula
(faster, better performing cars).

Also, as in the race story, educators set lower and lower standards to make their
performance look much better than it really is. Our schools are simply not close to
being competitive with those of our most capable competitors. Their children, not
ours, are being prepared to seize the best job opportunities of the future. This has
massive import to our future standard of living and our very survival as a nation.

How long will we grant huge amounts of money to the failed education process?
The waste in the current system is akin to the thousands of pounds of modifications
the race team made to the basic model. Attaching fancy gadgets to a failed
underlying “vehicle” or education philosophy is a fools approach. Yet it is we who
are fools to allow it to continue when it is wasting huge amounts of money AND
harming our kids. It shouldn’t be hard to demand changes once we face reality.
That is difficult because we feel foolish for not realizing the truth sooner. But the
truth must be faced if our kids are to be saved from hobbled futures. Results don’t
lie. The educators have proven they can’t improve no matter how much money we
give them. They can’t be trusted with something so important as the futures of our
kids. Clemenceau famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.”
Similarly, “Education is too important to be left to politicians and professional
educators.”

PWR 2010