Doug Johnson Website

What Happened to the Good Old Days of Education?
Head for the Edge, November 2001

I’m sure this never happens where you live, but public education here in Minnesota gets criticized on a regular basis. And I just don’t understand it. In my twenty-five years as a teacher, library media specialist, and administrator in the K-12 schools, I have never worked with better teachers in finer facilities with more resources – all combining to produce better educated graduates. Yet our governor has called schools the “black-hole” of state spending. Newspaper letter writers question why the bare-bone schools of one teacher, 30 students, a pencil sharpener and the 3r’s curriculum of their youth (and look how good I turned out) aren’t sufficient today.

The chart above from the Department of Labor may help explain why it often seems the better schools get, the more harsh the criticism. Each block represents the percent of the kinds of jobs available to students leaving high school in various years. Back in the days of Wally and the Beav, 60% of kids leaving school went to work in non-skilled jobs. If you followed directions well, showed up for work regularly, had a high tolerance for boredom and a strong back, there was a job for you on the factory floor or on the farm. The basic skills were enough, and many folks left school before even having those and were still able to support a family with the kinds of jobs available to them.

Fast-forward 50 years. With factories being automated and farm labor supplanted by applied science, only 15% of jobs now available can be considered “unskilled.” 85% of today’s students need the same skills and education that only about 40% needed in the “good old days.” There is no longer a place in the workforce for those very quiet or very loud kids we knew from our own days as students who just slipped through by virtue of seat time without ever really learning to read or write, let alone think critically, communicate successfully, be self-motivated, develop organizational skills, and creatively solve problems. Today’s employers actually need well-educated workers for almost every job they offer.

Of course the children that come to school are so much easier to teach today than in the 1950’s. Not! In our small town, middle class enclave right here in the Midwest:

The number of students coming from financially needy families has grown 35% in the past 15 years.
Our special education student population has increased 76% in the past 15 years.
Our English as a Second Language student population has increased 122% over just the past few years.

And of course everyone who has taught in the schools for any length of time knows that we see more and more children who come from single-parent families; have serious drug problems; or are just plain addicted to televisions or video games. Where is the child who lives in the house with the white picket fence next door to Ozzie and Harriet who heads to school each morning with her lunch lovingly packed by Mom after having been tutored by Dad the evening before? The students we teach are wonderful - the best kids ever. But they are certainly no easier to teach and maybe more difficult to reach than those of previous generations.

The problem is not that our schools are not getting better, they are simply not getting better fast enough.

What does this mean to us as library media specialists and technology directors? A few things:

The chart points out to me as an educator that much of our effort must be to teach those kids who in the 50’s did not need to be taught. As we design our research projects and reading programs, we must increase our efforts on the kids who may have just been passed on along in the Beaver’s classroom. They too need to be problem-solvers and life-long learners or there won’t much of a job out there for them.
We need to find new ways to motivate and challenge learners who may not come from a culture in which education may not be viewed as important. We must learn to connect with not just the mind, but also the heart of each student who comes to us.
As a profession we cannot apologize for the costs of the additional resources we need to educate all children, not just those few going on to college. Each and every one of us needs to loudly voice our professional opinion on the need for better libraries, highly qualified and remunerated educators, effective technologies, and good facilities. In fact, it is unprofessional for us to do any less.

(1) Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy, New York: 1997 Free Press, p. vii. The book was written by Harvard Professor Richard Murnane and MIT Professor Frank Levy; the Foreword, from which the graph was taken, was written by Thomas Payzant, Superintendent of Boston Public Schools.