"Stupid In America" - Full 20/20 Documentary
"Stupid in America" is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America's public schools and it's about time we face up to it.
Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, "You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It's a normal thing here."
We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools to see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but officials wouldn't allow it.
Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best classrooms in their district.
We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down in state after state.
Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C., allowed "20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked at two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says it's one of the best schools in America. Yet what the students taped didn't inspire confidence.
One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another "20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with his shirt off, in front of his teacher.
If you're like most American parents, you might think "These things don't happen at my kid's school." A Gallup Poll survey showed 76 percent of Americans were completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school.
Education reformers like Kevin Chavous have a message for these parents: If you only knew.
Even though people in the suburbs might think their schools are great, Chavous says, "They're not. That's the thing and the test scores show that."
Chavous and many other education professionals say Americans don't know that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because without competition, parents don't know what their kids might have had.
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posted by Dmitry Davydov at 4:14 AM
8 Comments:
20/20 is hardly the place I would turn to in order to get an unbiased view of American Education, but I have not seen the documentary. I work in a public school and I am guessing that most of this documentary is total propaganda. Just plain wrong. With that being said we do need to change to keep American on par with other nations. But, more funding for private schools is not the answer.
Its not the schools or the kids that are stupid, its targeting of kids by marketers that monopolize their attention and teaches them that the only important things to do in life are those that lead you to a life of consumption.
This is shit.
Even though I kind of knew this stuff already, seeing it on video is shocking to me to see how crappy schools have gotten. I think it's really pathetic that those kids get away with that, but parents don't teach their kids how to show respect and teachers have been totally stripped of any power to discipline kids and even stand up to an unruly kid in class.
The insulting word "stupid" might get you ratings, but it's the wrong word to use. Our kids aren't STUPID, they are IGNORANT. There is a big difference. Stupid implies that they couldn't learn the material. Our kids are just as smart as European kids; they've just been allowed to get away with learning nothing and being jerks.
Part of the problem is we've reduced our teachers to being nothing more than impotent babysitters, and this country craps all over them and totally disrespects them by not treating them as professionals and not paying them like it. If America wants a good school system, Americans are going to have to put their money where their mouths are, and quit paying too many useless administrators six figures each while teachers can't even make ends meet. We have exactly the public school system we deserve; as a result, the only people who teach in public school are those who are so dedicated that they can't imagine doing anything else, and losers who simply can't do anything else.
Furthermore I can't even believe that we are spending billions and billions of dollars on a needless war when our schools are this pathetic. You look at the national budget and you'll see where the vast majority of our money goes. You can't tell me national defense comes at the expense of our future. You can't tell me we don't have the money to have a decent education for everyone.
I hate to make such a large, complex issue seem resolvable with a single statement, but I'm convinced that there's a single reason for all of this: apathy. Kids in america (and I was one, once) are, in general, much more interested in continuing the consumer-oriented, self-entitled lifestyle they've grown accustomed to. Even the poorer kids (I was one of those too). I realize this is a generalization, and I can't offer any single-fire solutions because it's not just children in america, it's America itself. I guess that makes me a terrorist, but the fact is that the attitude makes all the difference, and I have a suspicion that a big helping of humble pie is just around the corner.
I whole heartedly disagree with, I'd say, probably everything in the video. But before I write my response, which is much longer then it needs to be, and my segment by segment breakdown of the video, I'd like to say a few preambles.
1. I appreciate you for posting this link. Seriously. Because there are improvements that can be made to public education, and this video sparks that discussion, so it is really valuble. Hell, I've spent like an two and a half hours responding to it and I left stuff out. This website is a good one, keep up the good work whoever you are.
2. I'm not going to just argue against what Stossel said, because that would be petty (see item 4). I'll offer my own solutions to the problem, but mainly argue against Stossel.
3. John Stossel and I are enemies. I first ran across his unique brand of libertarianism in high school, when I watched a special he made about the environment. First he claimed oil wells increase the population of deer, and that there are more trees in America now then when the constitution was written. If this were true, I don't think we would have nviromentalism. (in case you are wondering there maybe are more trees now then before, but there sure as fuck is less habitat and untouched wilderness, and I don't know maybe the deer populations go up around oil wells because the oil workers feed the deers and kill off the deer's natural predators like wolves and cougars. Just a guess)
4. My second interaction with Stossel is more entertaining. He went on The O'reilly Factor and said that Conservatives give more money then liberals to charity. My main bone of contention was a test he did. He had the Salvation Army go to North Dakota and San Francisco to see which city gave more money. (you can guess which he pegged as liberal) North Dakota beat San Fran 2 to 1 and thus, liberals are stingy. This bugged me. I mean, it just didn't make sense why San Franciscans would give so much less. Maybe it is all the bums asking for money all around the town, or maybe us socialist, atheistic liberals hate poor people. But it turns out the salvation army has really harsh anti-gay policies, and apperently there are a number of gay people living in sf, and there have been protests against the salvation army in the city, and even the city council of san fran has made rulings against the salvation army. So surprise surprise, San Franciscans didn't want to give money to the salvation army because they dislike its anti-gay stances. So I called O'reilly's radio show and told O'reilly this, and he agreed with me that I was right, the test was bunk and that he probably should have looked into it. Admittedly, this was petty.
5. The weakness of Stossel's presentation shows how important it is to ingest the right media, or in another words, why we should all listen to NPR and read the New Yorker. I've listened to about a million hours worth of better stuff on NPR, and that's just in the last week. This being said, the blog this doc is on seems pretty interesting and worth paying attention to. It seems pretty fair politically and I'll book mark it.
6. I'll go through the video chronologically, and for irony's sake I probably won't proof read what I've written.
7. When I argue against a specific thing in Stossel's video, I'll note what time it was in the video like this (min 27) meaning there are 27 minutes left in the video counter, because it counts backwards.
I have one last thing to say before I respond to what Stossel presented and that is this: I went to public schools. And I can't read. It's true. All through college I would stare at my books and wonder what those mysterious squiggly lines meant. I can't point out America on a map, don't even ask me who the vice-president is or even what it is he does, I still think New England is a state and I regularly say "me and Michael . . ." instead of "Michael and I . . ." But in spite of these glaring educational deficiencies my public school education has cursed me with, I'll muster all the energy I can to respond to Stossel. Maybe after I'm done I'll go to a Sylvan learning center for a few hours, and they'll teach me to read ( min.27)
So, the essay:
There are a number of things wrong with Stossel and his doc "Stupid in America" aside from Stossel just being a jack-ass. Stossel tends to oversimplify the problems with education and he uses way to much anecdotal evidence. But the main I have with Stossel is with his world view. Stossel tends to lean libertarian; I tend to lean left/socialist. Stossel believes our education system is screwed up and the solution is to leave education up to the free market. I believe our education system is fine and that the difference between dumb kids and smart kids has more to do with socio-economic class level and each student's self-determination than with the schools; if we really want to make our schools as good as they can be (and we should) then we should increase the school year, pay teachers more and shrink class sizes. The other main difference between me and him though, is that I'm right, and he is wrong.
Writing a response to Stossel is actually pretty tough. It's tough not because he makes good arguments -he doesn't- but because he makes his points so badly. My god, a logic professor would probably kill themselves if they watched this. Half the time I'm arguing with his style then with his argument. This occurs right in the first segment of the doc. Less then one min. in, he proves our schools are bad because 1. Movies show dumb kids in school(39:22) and 2. He gave some kids cameras and they showed the "real" side to schools(37:30). Example one shows how selectively biased he is in presentation. I can think of plenty of portrayals of smart characters in school in movies and tv shows (Urkul from family matters, Jessie and Screech in saved by the bell, martin and lisa from the simpsons, the kids from weird science) but Stossel shows us two of dumb kids in movies. Strike one. The second point involving students filiming their school is actually much more insidious and creepy. It's a fairly convincing visual image of how bad our schools are decying. But if you think about, its not that surprising at all. I'd be more surprised if those teenagers hadn't goofed off, especially with the chance to get on national televison, especially the week after finals.(like stossel says that it was in the video(37:33) Giving a teenager a camera and not expecting to him to goof off in front of it is like giving a monkey a grenade and expecting it not explode. It's just going to happen. I wish Stossel had given me a camera the week before my Calc AP test senior year. I wasn't goofing off then.
So stossel hasn't made any good points yet. But he needs to because for his doc to make sense, he needs to show our schools our failing. He needs to have a call to action to hook the viewers. So what is stossel's next point to show our schools are failing? Belgium students are smarter then American students!(36:22) I actually like this point because he lets me digress into a common complaint I have about how the media reports about education in America compared to the rest of the world. Education is different in Belgium. If you go onto wikipedia's article "education in Belgium" it explains that in Belgium, starting in their version middle school and through high school you are put into one of four groups: General Secondary Education-30% of the students; Techincal Secondary education-30%; Vocational Secondary School-30%; and art school. Notice how Stossel didn't say which group of Belgiums he gave the test to. Notice how he didn't mention how the choice of school he went to is determined on testing. I'd bet pennies to pesos it was the top-tier school This is surprising given that Stossel's program is all about how important it is to give parents choices regarding their kids, and yet in Belgium, and for a large part the rest of Europe, the biggest complaint about their education system is that students get locked into educational tracks and can't get out. There is no second chance. There is no chance to go to a junior college late in life, or after secondary school and change your path. You get trained as a mechanic in vocational school, you are a mechanic for life. And you won't get the same education as the other Belgium kid in the better General Secondary level. Later (35)Stossel will go on to show that America isn't ranked well internationally in terms of education. But ask yourselves, which students are getting tested in the other countries? I know Mexico ranks above America in some studies on education. But are they testing the impoverished kids selling chiclets before the border crossing on the way back from mexico? I'm going to guess no, private schooled Mexican students are while in America, everyone gets the same education, with varying levels of classes determined by the students willingness to take those classes.
So Stossel has failed to prove the educational crisis our country is in, but lets humor him and see what he has to say about how we improve our schools.
Stossel's second segment gets into some juicier territory. Do schools need more money? Now I actually agree with Stossel on his first point, just giving schools more money doesn't make them better. He shows a school district Kansas City(35) that got a boat load of money and built gyms, pools and a computer lab and even taxi'd in white kids to school and surprise surprise, grades didn't go up. What I disagree with is his next point. I think the reason the grades and graduation rates of the students at the school didn't go up because new swimming pools don't make kids smarter, or in other words, they spent the money on the wrong things. Extra money should go to paying teachers more, hiring better teachers and hiring more teachers. Stossel disagrees. Stossel thinks giving schools less money makes them more efficient. Less money equals better education. Aside from this being illogical, he gives an example of where it worked. He tells the tale of Indian Charter School, a school in Oakland that has remarkably test scores then all the others around it. In just three years,this school, whose principal is Ben Chavis went form the bottom to the top. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but this 130 person school has 10 of its kids kicked out every year because of poor performance, has teacher to student ratios way below the state average and pays its teachers 5000 dollars a year more then other Oakland area school, and the principle is on record calling some students "lazy Mexicans" and, because it is a private school, can use corporal punishment. Stossel doesn't mention this in the video, I had to do my own research. So take a school, pay teachers more and lower class sizes and kick out the bottom 10% and your test scores will go up. Big surprise.
With this last point and his next one, Stossel is trying to prove one thing: private institutions work better then public ones. To show this, he takes a high-school student who can't read to a sylvan learning center and in two hours, he can read, while the whole time his mom moans, "why didn't the schools teach my student?" Which is funny because if I had to guess the one thing that motivates kids to read, I would guess that it is having a parent read to a child when they are young. No, that's not a guess that is what makes kids better readers. So instead of the mom complaining, she should have actually taught her kid when he was young, instead of expecting other people to do it. And I don't think four hours of training can teach a kid to read two grade levels better, otherwise I would have had a college reading level in second grade.
Stossel presents Charter and Private schools as a panacea to all the education woes in this country. This just isn't true. Stossel shows about four anecdotal examples of great private schools in America and a unmoving story about the kids of the governor of South Carolina, along with his incomplete description of the Belgium public education system (third segment). I would go over how the section on the governor of South Carolina is ridiculous, but it was so obviously a political stunt, I won't mention it. But I will take this time to describe how private schools actually work, or would work in my case. If I were to go to one of the private schools in South Orange County, it would run me about $10,000 a year which assuming I had a $3,000 state voucher would means my parents would have paid $84,000 from K through 12 (actually 168,000, including my brother) and that's assuming my parents don't give outside of what the tuition is because some schools expect outside donations. Some of you may say, but hey is the cream of the crop, I'm sure lots of schools will be only 3,000 dollars a year. Well, no, land is too expensive and you're right a lot of shitty schools will pop-up to handle lower class kids. Essentially, the difference between poor kids and rich kids will widen even more then it is today. It will enforce class levels just like it has in Europe for years. Also, as an added bonus, any the state won't have any say on what is taught so a hypothetical neo-nazis school or Islamic extremist school isn't possible, its inevitable. And private school teachers don't have to have credentials (just like the school mentioned two paragraphs earlier, which had half of its faculty uncredentialed.) Factor in the cost of my UC education compared to Pepperdine or USC and its enormous, especially for little to no difference in end result in terms of quality.
And has anyone noticed Stossel hasn't presented any statistics in this whole episode? Its minute 30 and he hasn't mentioned one! His whole proof was anecdotes and one on one interviews. I guarantee I could find anecdotal evidence to disprove everything he said, but that's poor arguing. I wouldn't do it.
I'm not going to go into Stossel's arguments on unions or his comparison of public schools to communist Russia. (I just don't care) but I'm going to end with this: 1. He failed to prove our schools our failing, at least in my eyes. 2. Private schools aren't better, and a universally private school system has many more bad things associated with it. 3. We need to pay teachers more, and keep kids in class longer. I'd provide more proof for this last point, but that's another essay all together.
Thanks for y'alls time,
Eric
Post script(35:22). Stossel shows a clip from the Jay Leno show of normal Americans getting obvious questions wrong. Things like this pop –up all the time, from media reports that Americans can't point out America on a map to other examples of how dumb the average person is. My question is this: how come media outlets never ask hard questions like what is the quadratic formula? Name the negotiations Metternich participated in? The reason is, these are hard questions and a lot of people don't know the answers to them, and then the reader couldn't be snotty and say well I knew that, my how dumb everyone else is. It is because everyone does know the answer to these questions that they get reported.
Does anyone really think that guy Leno interviewed had never heard of War and Peace? Would Leno really show his dumb answer if he didn't expect that 99% of his audience had heard of War and Peace?
I grew up around teachers and this is the attitude I saw: "get rid of the stupid kids (like me, I was learning disabled") and leave me the 10 smart kids I can teach."
I thought Canadian schools were sad, but my heart drops to know how much lower our close neighbours rank.
Best of luck.. though better than luck would be an unbiased open mind to the potential benefits. Accept when something is not delivering what you expect and move on to achieve the desired outcome.
Noam Chomsky has said something to the effect, American schools (run by the Government) are producing exactly the desired outcome (apparently), as if this was not the outcome, they would be changed to produce the desired outcome. Look into yourselves and look up the chain to figure out who wants this outcome and why they want this outcome.
Some would say educated people are just difficult to "manage."
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