The participants in our dialogue are discussing curriculum and national standards, leading into the issue of self-esteem in children....
Q- Teachers claim that national assessments would force them to teach to the test and have the same result as mandating curriculum. Where would the innovation, spontaneity and experimentation that you and Mr. Gatto favor, enter the picture?
A- The problem, as I see it, is standardizing what shouldn't be standardized. Who is qualified to make those kinds of decisions? It used to be taken for granted that in the USA such things were decided by the market place. Now we hear about the Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, a group of philosopher kings who have taken on the task of defining the basic competencies needed for most entry-level jobs.
It scares the daylights out of me when I think episodes from the Twilight Zone are being played out in my lifetime and I seem powerless to stop what I perceive to be the ruination of my country.
Not long ago I wrote about all the levels of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union that presented an almost comical barrier for those attempting to accomplish anything in either agriculture or industry. Now I can honestly say along with Pogo, "We have seen the enemy and it is us!"
Q- I've heard the need for national testing of school children, compared to a farmer weighing lambs. Lambs don't get fat by weighing nor do school children learn to read or compute by taking tests.
By the way, do you happen to know when our students were achieving the highest scores on the SAT tests?
A- I believe that was back in 1963 and I know SAT scores were on a decline throughout the seventies and still haven't rebound to that 1963 level. In fact in August, 1991 the College Board announced that nationwide verbal SAT scores dropped to an all-time low and declined in math.
Q- Many educators point to those tests scores as proof that more money should be put into our educational system. What do you think?
A- This country spends more dollars per pupil than any other nation and gets less in return. I know one thing; lower test scores cannot be laid at the feet of the American taxpayer!
Q- An elementary school principal in Staten Island was charged with altering student answer sheets on standardized reading and math tests. In 1990 the scores showed that 92 percent of Brenner's students were reading at or above the average for their grade. New test results in May indicated that only 60 percent of the students were reading at or above the average for their grade.
A- That's going too far in trying to avoid a penalty, or attract an award. In the past principals have been trained not to listen to teachers because principals are supposedly the only ones with an overview of the subject.
Dade County, Florida, for the past four years, has allowed autonomy in all their schools. They give each facility in their district a block of money to spend at their discretion. Instead of an assistant principal, a district is free to hire four para-professionals. Teachers make decisions on how the funds can best be spent right along with the principals.
Q- A teacher called a talk show program in the Bay Area in November of 1990 to report what she referred to as an all too common experience.
She told the audience that in California, children are tracked (segregated) by language and race, in an attempt to help them, of course. She spoke of a middle class child, born in this country and with two working parents, but because of her Hispanic background, tracked from Kindergarten through 5th grade in a Spanish-only program. The mother was pleading that her child be taught English and yet the well-meaning bilingual pressure group tried to get her to place her child in yet another after-school Spanish speaking program. They heard her requests for English but kept assuring her that it was her decision and that Spanish was just fine and she should not feel pressured into having her child make the change to English.
A- How was the teacher involved?
Q- The teacher reporting the episode was present at the meeting between the child's mother and the Spanish-only pressure group. This teacher's job was to conduct very intensive English catch-up courses. Her point was that the child had been taught nothing but Spanish for six years at an extra expense to the taxpayers and now at an even greater extra expense this teacher had been called in to straighten the child out with intense English classes.
A-It looks like another example of good intentions gone awry.
Q- Because this bilingual group, with nothing but good intentions, mistakenly postponed the learning of English, a young Hispanic child suffered.
A- Sometimes the intentions are not pure. The jobs of bilingual teachers are preserved at the expense of the very students they portend to help.
Q- It's only human nature to try and rationalize the continuation of programs that have gone wrong or accomplished their purpose but that at any rate are no longer needed.
A- The answer to our education problems may not lie in giving teachers more authority, more respect and more money---in fact we may want to get rid of some of the least capable teachers. Why don't we try some new blood in the teaching field? It makes sense to get rid of incompetent malcontents and we know for a fact that they exist in the teaching profession. They bring down the morale of good dedicated teachers. It is stupid to treat good and mediocre or worse teachers all the same.
Q- Actually 22 percent of teachers who responded to a 1990 poll said they were not well prepared in subject-matter knowledge to teach; 54 percent thought they were not well prepared to recognize student learning styles and 44 percent thought they were not well prepared in understanding child and adolescent development. 78 percent of teachers polled said they were in education because of a desire to work with young people; the second most popular reason chosen was the value of education to society= 38 percent; job security was third and 32 percent were attracted to the long summer vacation.
Unfortunately 30 percent thought they had too much invested to leave. Most telling was the fact that 83 percent thought schools should adjust to needs and interests of students rather than students adjusting to expectations of the school, 77 percent thought academic achievement standards should be flexible enough so that every child could feel successful and 25 percent thought kids should be passed to the next grade regardless of performance.
A- "So that every child could feel successful"? That's what's wrong with our educational system in one classic sentence! In California it is illegal to keep a student in a grade below his age group, even though he may not have developed the skills to move on.
Q- I thought you'd be incensed, but you know, you should keep an open mind.
A- I'm beginning to think some people might have kept their mind's so open that their brains escaped!
Chester Finn, in his book, We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future, tells the story of a student teacher at a college of education who proudly told her colleagues that she carefully avoided introducing her second-grade students to words they did not know on the grounds that "the children should feel good about themselves as readers."
Q- Calm down. There is another side, you know.
In 1990 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) commissioned a study which found that between the ages of 9 and 15 self-esteem among girls took a real plunge and supposedly led them to give up any ambitions they might have otherwise had in the academic area. The connection was made that self-esteem is correlated in a positive fashion with academic achievement.
A-Such a connection is refuted by a 1989 study of children from six countries who were tested in math and asked how they thought they did. The Koreans that did the best showed poor self-esteem in thinking they did the worst, whereas the Americans showed excellent self-esteem by thinking they did the best and actually coming out on the bottom of the ladder. The AAUW forgot to take into account the findings that minority girls felt great about themselves but did far worse than the others in math and science. One might conclude that self-esteem is not a prerequisite for good mathematicians.
Q- What about enhancing self-esteem among minority races?
A- Attempts have been made to do this for quite some time.
Miami has a 45 minute a day elementary school class for sixty students--it is described as an "Afro-centric self-esteem class."
In Detroit in 1991 27 girls enrolled in the intended all-boys schools (560 boys) which the ACLU and NAACP and NOW stopped.
In Minneapolis thirty at-risk students, although of both sexes, ran up against desegregation laws when they were put in a remedial class.
In Baltimore twenty-seven black kindergarten boys, having trouble and all being raised by a single mother, were put in a class taught by a young black man who is staying with them through fifth grade. The attendance, behavior and academic record is so good that Baltimore is adding more such classes and some for all-girls also. So far no one has objected.
Q- I heard that a black student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 with better than a C plus average receives a check from the University for $580, if a B plus or better is earned, his check is doubled to $1160. The rewards are given, not on basis of need, but on the basis of race.
A- In Florida a campus offered free tuition for blacks; not on the basis of need. This race-biased treatment naturally raises resentment in nonblack students. Berkeley, Stanford, Oberlin, University of Massachusetts and Amherst are the campuses with the most intense racial tensions in the nineties. It seems the more liberal and progressive the institution, the higher the tensions. Yet liberals tend to blame the Reagan Era for racial tensions. Why then aren't right wing and southern campuses involved?
Q- Have you heard of Teach for America, the program started by a young student that recruits graduates from the top colleges in a kind of Teach Corp---a variation of the Peace Corp only these new graduates, after a summer training program, give a couple years of their lives to teaching in the nations schools.
A- Indeed I have, although Teach for America was only started in 1990. The energy and commitment volunteers bring to the various school situations has been absolutely phenomenal in many cases. What these eager, generous young people lack in teaching experience they make up in intelligence and enthusiasm.
I am really impressed by everything I have heard about Teach for America. Most of all I like the fact that it is a volunteer organization and shows that people truly do care and still feel they can make a difference to the country. More than anything, I like the energy and example of the founder, 24 year old Wendy Kopp who has said, "I believe in change. There's always a better way to do something." Amen.
Q- Is the program funded by taxpayers?
A- As a nonprofit organization it is funded by charitable contributions from foundations, business and individuals. Unfortunately the organization is pushing for federal funding, which I believe is a mistake.
Q- What do you make of the fact that we spend more on education than any other country and yet our children are not getting a decent education?
A- Did you know between 1929 and 1987 total real expenditures per pupil--that's adjusted for inflation--rose 500 percent in the public school system?
Q- And yet Ronald Reagan was supposed to have cut education to the bone.
A-As you well know, most spending on education occurs at the state and local level and during the Reagan era in the eighties real per-pupil spending on education grew 24 percent as opposed to a 16 percent growth during the seventies. You hear otherwise because education lobbyists like to distort the facts. Gross dollar amounts are used instead of per-pupil expenditures. Gross amounts show a slow down in spending on education which was due to the Baby Bust that followed the Baby Boom.
Q- The famous decrease in the rate of increase.
A- Actually we spend far more on education than most people realize. No one figures the cost of the unfunded pension liabilities which the states will have to pick up as teachers and others connected with the public school system retire. These obligations are rarely, if ever included in any state's per-pupil cost, but they are real and they are expensive.
The costs of buildings and land are not included and in comparing the price of public versus private education options, the fringe benefits provided to teachers are often left out of the equation, even though they make up as much as one-third of a teacher's compensation.
The public school system spends a national average of $5,200 per pupil. Chris Whittle broke the cost down and found that we pay $250 million an hour to run the public school system, kindergarten through twelfth grade. He found that if we took all the millions of dollars donated by businesses and foundations across the nation each year and lumped those dollars all together in one pot, the donations would run the public school system for approximately 90 minutes.
Q- Who is Chris Whittle and did he include all those hidden costs in his calculations?
A- Chris is founder of Whittle Communications, the company that unsuccessfully tried to get news programs, backed by advertising, into public schools a couple years ago. I have no idea how he reached the figure he did and will have to look into it further. His latest entrepreneurial scheme will cost $2.5 billion and like his last idea, has no guarantee of getting off the ground. He plans to build and operate 200 private schools over the next five years.
Q- I would think you would favor the idea of new affordable schools providing competition to existing schools.
A-The Education Alternatives Inc. (EAI) is a for-profit enterprise considering a five year experiment to manage public schools. Instead of competing with, they want to become part of the current public school system and to improve it from within.
Q- How does EAI intend to make money?
A- It hopes to sell educational programs and other proprietary products and to collect fees from training and consulting with school personnel.
Q- Why should schools give AEI taxpayer dollars when administrators are already receiving hefty salaries to manage the schools?
A- Especially why should they pay an outfit that has lost $6.6 million over its five year history? It will all depend on the results achieved with students.
Q- And keeping expenses down.
A- That's true whether we're discussing public or private education. School districts have been known to save money by providing their own health insurance. A local district dropped out of the county health pool and insured itself and saved enough to give teachers a much needed six percent pay hike.
Q- Joelene Unsoeld, congresswoman from the state of Washington, expressed outrage that money, which is so badly needed to help families and children, is being diverted to weapons. She is angry that only six percent is spent by the federal government on education.
A-Education has historically and purposely been the responsibility of state and local governments.
Q- A responsibility which some districts handle better than others. School officials in Quincy, Massachusetts attend school proms in tuxedos paid for by taxpayers' even though money for text books in the local schools are in short supply.
A- If you're looking for ways to control the cost of education one solution might be to cut the number and the pay of administrators. Chicago's school superintendent makes $175,000 a year and spent another $67,000 in expenses, meanwhile asking 30,000 teachers to give up a scheduled pay raise. When asked to cut his own salary as a symbolic gesture he was interested but ended up recommending a ninety percent cut in the amount spent on supplies and equipment and deferring building maintenance and repair until the following year.
Q- Are you serious?
A-The situation is serious. To steal a smooth phrase from the masters of one-line advertisements; we are definitely spending more now and enjoying it less.
In 1981 we spent an average of $2,491 per public school pupil; in 1991 that figure increased to $5,638; up thirty-three percent after inflation.
Q- What about H.R.3, the legislation so heatedly debated in the House in 1990 and finally vetoed by George Bush? What exactly did that bill contain?
A- H.R. 3 would spend $2 billion over 4 years on early childhood education. It would expand Head Start to ten hours a day year round and include families with incomes up to $31,200 / year.
Currently the Head Start program consists of 1,300 programs restricted to families below the poverty level, during the school year only and for just half a day.
H. R. 3 would provide half the money necessary to fund the program and local governments would provide the other half. The new system would also act as an all-day-year-round day care center and as such would reach out to families making $33,300. CBO estimates the program would cost a total of $7.6 billion.
Q- Don't most states pay for preschool for poor children anyway?
A- Twenty-eight states do.
Q- It is often alleged that every dollar spent on pre-school education saves taxpayers six dollars that might otherwise be needed for special education, teen pregnancy, welfare and crime. Is this true?
A- Spending per child on Head Start programs averages approximately $3,000 nationwide, without including local matching funds. A program for 17 four-year olds held in a church building in Jersey City, New Jersey cost $4,000 per child and was run by two teachers and a parent-helper.
Q- That is incredibly expensive!
A- Don't forget Head Start provides a hot meal and a snack as well as medical and dental screenings and immunizations. However Ron Haskins, a developmental psychologists and senior staff member of the House Ways and Means Committee, concludes the research literature on preschool education won't support the claim that such education will yield lasting impacts on childrens' school performance nor will it provide substantial returns on the investment of public dollars.
Another critic is Edward Zigler, author of Head Start in the sixties and currently involved in preschool education at Yale. He claims universal preschool education is a misguided enterprise.
Different families and different children have different needs. In fact early schooling may be harmful for some four year olds. He has found that the conversations that young children carry on at home are more helpful than a school experience in many cases.
Medical attention and nutrition may offer the greatest benefits for poor kids in these early childhood programs, not education.
Q- I've also heard that black 4 year olds now attend programs at the same rate as white kids. Surely that's advantageous.
A- It's not a matter of race but Dr. Zigler allows that having disadvantaged children mixing with middle class children would benefit the former but the later would more likely do better at home. He thinks government programs should focus on the poverty population and not give scarce places to those who don't need them. There are alternatives for middle class parents who seek preschool experiences .
Q-I've always assumed that Head Start is a program that works. I've never heard anything to the contrary and the program ranks right up there in popularity with the social security system.
A- All that praise stems from the results of a single 1985 study of the Perry Preschool program in Ypsilanti, Michigan which tracked 123 black youths into young adulthood and concluded that the 58 students who had attended the Perry Preschool program incurred half the teen pregnancy of their non-preschool counterparts, less juvenile delinquency and were less likely to become dependent on welfare.
To use a study of such a ridiculously tiny sampling, especially when its results are contrary to so many other larger samplings, as justification for spending billions of dollars on a national pre-school program is ludicrous!
Perry does not offer incontestable proof that taxpayers will save millions of dollars by investing in early education as proponents claim. But because the miraculous benefits of pre-school education has been presented to the general public as unquestionable fact, all discussion has been stifled.
Other studies have investigated millions of children and found no correlation between preschool and long term success.
Q- Senator Kennedy cites the Perry Preschool as a dropout prevention, crime prevention and teen pregnancy prevention program all rolled up into one.
A- Developmental psychologists are skeptical because, as I just stated, the sample at Perry was small and those results have not been duplicated at any other preschools.
In fact parental involvement seems to have done the trick at Perry and getting parents to be more concerned and involved with their children does not require federal dollars. (Perry teachers visited each home weekly throughout the year.)
Q- Keith Geiger, President of the National Education Association runs counter to developmental psychologists when he says that youngsters develop basic learning, and social skills in pre-school that shape their development for years to come. "We've known this essential truth for a long time."
He claims the Perry Preschool study "demonstrated that good preschool programs increase the likelihood that disadvantaged children will graduate, enroll in postsecondary schooling, and find employment."
He goes on to deplore the "hodgepodge of public and private daycare centers, nursery schools, childcare homes, and babysitters of widely differing quality, huge variation in cost, and limited availability."
He brings up the census bureau prediction that by 1995 eighty percent of children under age six will have mothers working outside the home. He says children in families with incomes over $35,000 are twice as likely to be enrolled in preschool programs as children whose families earn less than $10,000 a year and suggests that this is a prescription for educational, social and economic disaster.
A- How ridiculous to conclude "This is a prescription for educational, social and economic disaster."
Q- When stating that school-based early childhood education was left out of the federal childcare initiative passed by the 101st congress he added "Once again the needs of America's children fell victim to political expediency."
A- What in the *#@#* does that mean? Politically expedient to be against children?
Q- Mr. Geiger went on, "That does nothing to help this country catch up to Germany, France, Sweden, Japan and every other major industrialized nation--all of which are far ahead of the United States in providing publicly subsidized, universally available early childhood programs."
A- I'm so sick of hearing society---a group of hardworking, mostly compassionate and well-meaning individual producers get blamed for everything that falls short of perfection in this country. People care, and although I think redistribution by force is the poorest way to get anything accomplished, the nation should take pride in the fact that of the 460,000 children presently participating in the nation's Head Start program, eighty percent come from families living below the poverty line. These families are eligible for, and many receive health, education and nutrition services. Let's stop concentrating on the empty half of the glass.
Q- What about S.B. 123; Smart Start?
A- S.B. 123, sponsored by Massachusetts' Senator Edward Kennedy, would give federal grants to states and cities in order to educate all four year olds regardless of economic circumstances. The proposal calls for a sliding scale to be charged to upper and middle income parents. It would authorize expenditures of $500 million in FY1990, $750 million in FY1991 and $1 billion in FY1992, 1993 and 1994.
Q- Wouldn't S.B. 123 mainly benefit the poor and possibly harm a good many children who would find themselves forced into a school situation prematurely, at least according to Dr. Ziegler's theories?
A- Not only that, parents who don't think mandated preschool is a good idea would be forced to subsidize it anyway. Already twenty-eight states fund pre-kindergarten and ninety percent of the nation's five year olds attend kindergarten. The federally funded programs would have to meet certain federal standards and for-profit and religious institutions would not be eligible for funds.
Q- As long as we're talking about legislation proposed in congress, what can you say about H.R.5115, the Equity & Excellence in Education Act?
A- I know it better as the Bartlett-Eckhardt Amendment for Parental Choice, the legislation advocating open enrollment in public schools. It was found that private school enrollment decreased in Massachusetts where it was tested. There was no longer a need to flee from the public schools when open enrollment was instituted.
Q- I thought H.R. 5115 had something to do with stemming illiteracy?
A- H.R.5115 would set up a National Institute For The Study Of Illiteracy. I can't recall the estimated cost of the House bill but I do remember the words of one congressional proponent and they scare me: "Such a big problem DESERVES a national organization!" OY VEH!
Q- What about the National Literacy Act?
A- Senator Paul Simon of Illinois and Representative Tom Sawyer of Ohio introduced the National Literacy act which failed to pass in the 101st Congress. It would have spent an additional $900 million on unproven programs and certainly increased federal involvement in education. It also would have duplicated existing and underutilized programs. There are already 4,200 adult literacy programs even though only between five percent and ten percent of adult illiterates are enrolled in a program. The drop out rate here is between 50 percent and 75 percent.
Q- Clint Bolick of the Heritage Foundation claimed only five percent of high school seniors can decipher a bus schedule and only twenty percent can write a letter.
A- Not long ago in Los Angeles, Pacific Bell had some job openings and 258 applicants responded but only 140 showed up for testing. Of those, only seven percent were able to pass the test, the rest simply didn't have the skills for entrance level jobs. It seems that Citicorp of Illinois rejects 840 of every 1000 applicants for entry level tellers because they can't complete the forms.
Q- Business spends a fortune trying to teach new employees what all employees started out with a few decades ago.
A- You're right. The cost to business for remedial employee-training was estimated at $30 billion in 1988 according to the American Society for Training and Development, an Alexandria, Virginia group. This is money that would have been saved if the school system were doing its job. These costs threaten the competitiveness of American companies. John Bishop, a Cornell University economist, estimates a $3 trillion loss in our GNP between now and 2010 thanks to our deteriorating education system.
Q- If you want to bring up world competitiveness, you better realize that Japan took the lead in technology-intensive exports back in 1986 and in 1990 it was spending a larger share of its GNP on nondefense research and development.
A- That's not news. Both Japan and Germany, our closest competitors, have spent a larger percentage of their GNP on nondefense R&D for almost twenty years. Not that we haven't been engaged in R&D but most of our R&D has been defense oriented. In fact an interesting set of statistics traces the source of R&D funds for the three countries and shows nothing very surprising in the fact that Germany gets approximately sixty-one percent of its R&D from industry and thirty-eight percent from government, Japan gets about seventy percent from industry and twenty percent from government . . .
Q- Excuse me, but I would have thought the Japanese government provided a larger percentage of the funds for that nation's research and development.
A- The real surprise is that the United States government provides close to 49 percent of the funds for our R&D---the same amount as industry.
Q- I find that hard to believe. You mean this nation gets a greater portion of its R&D funding from the United States government than is provided by the governments of either Germany or Japan? The line between a socialist state and a capitalist state seems to be rather sketchy.
A- I warned you that these facts would sound surprising, but it makes more sense when you realize that our government provides the funds because most of our R&D has been oriented towards defense. Unfortunately capital for research in the United States costs about fifty percent more than it does in Germany and one hundred and fifty percent more than capital costs in Japan. There's our real problem.
Q- High priced capital and low-skilled young workers. I read that thirteen percent of U.S. kids are illiterate compared to one percent of Japan's.
A- Be careful with comparisons. You need to define illiteracy and know exactly who is being compared to whom and when etc.
The Economic Policy Institute, a DC think tank, issued a report early in 1990 that was supposed to show that the United States ranked 14th out of 16 industrialized countries in spending on education, pointing to the fact that only 4.1 percent of its GDP (gross domestic product) went to education whereas West Germany devotes 4.6 percent and Japan 4.8 percent.
Because our GDP is so much larger we still spend more than any other country (except Switzerland) on education on a per pupil basis which is the only way that it makes sense to look at the situation.
Q- Well we must be doing something right or why are so many foreign students enrolled in our institutions? For instance, more than 30,000 Japanese students attend American schools. In fact a new hotline where the operators speak Japanese, was installed at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management in 1991 because the year before more Japanese students applied to this Ithaca, New York institution than did residents of New York.
A- I don't want to minimize our problem with illiteracy. I will grant you that American high school graduates in the eighties were more than one year behind the test scores of their sixties counterparts.
Q- Salem's Bush Elementary School, with 75 percent of families below the poverty level and one third not speaking English, has what they call an Even Start literacy program which provides weekly tutoring. Even an 85 year old lady has been helping out for five years. The local church helps with language and is currently building a playground
A- In West Lynn where parents regularly participate in the classroom, over 50 percent of middle school science students are given local internships through a program called Future Makers.
Q- Isn't there something called a Literacy Network?
A- That's right. It is a national umbrella sheltering activities in eleven cities around the nation. The best example is Houston's Read Commission.
Q- Dick Gephardt addressed the Governors' Association in February 1991. He said the federal government cut education and job training funding by 30 percent during the 1980s. Is that true?
A- I don't buy that for a minute. Although I can't give you exact figures off the top of my head of what was cancelled here and picked up there, my general knowledge and the huge debt build-up, assures me nothing was cut during the eighties.
Some programs might not have grown as fast as proponents liked or were closed and funds were transferred to supposedly more efficient programs to accomplish the same thing.
As for example a program I vividly recall that was training 75 mostly single mothers, for jobs at a cost of $14,000 per trainee was terminated in the spring of 1986 but there were many more both public and private to pick up the slack. (See The American Deficit Fulfillment Of A Prophecy (1988) pp 169-172)
Q- At any rate House Majority Leader Gephardt delivered the usual liberal rhetoric about investing in human capital and warned if we don't pay now we will pay even more later.
A- I heard his address to the Governors and recall that he said that Ronald Reagan's federalism, instead of being dollars without strings was strings without dollars.
Q- Cute!
A- He hoped the proposal expressed in the administration's FY1992 budget would not turn out to be a shell game or an abdication of responsibility masquerading as flexibility. He introduced his own new program called Rewards for Results, an alternative to simply funding programs. By its terms the federal government would insist on seeing results before providing the money.
Q- Now he's talking!
A- Mr. Gephardt claimed to understand the taxpayers' skepticism when it came to big government and agreed that instead of micro-managing, the government should provide incentives.
Q- Bravo!
A- He suggested the states get a bonus from the federal government for every child in the state that is able to show improvement over his or her beginning status as to health care, immunizations, nutrition, early childhood education and of course the state should get a bonus for providing universal prenatal care.
Q- I don't remember this. How was the bonus to be determined?
A- The size of the bonus would be inversely proportional to a child's family income--the bonus would be tied to the achievement of certain goals.
Q- Wouldn't that be enormously expensive?
A- Of course it would be expensive, but you know the pitch: "pay now, save later". This version claimed for every dollar invested in our children we would get $4.50 in return because we won't have to pay indigent health care, on-job training, welfare and prison expenses later on. Mr. Gephardt suggested the government get back to basics and invest in our people, train and care for them and they'll lead us.
Q- Well, I know he lost you there!
A- Absolutely. "We have to take care of them", says daddy Gephardt. I guess my hair stands on end when I run into one of these arrogant and condescending philosopher-kings.
Q- You don't exactly hide your contempt. But how will the government get the money for the Gephardt Rewards for Results plan?
A- Business will provide, as for everything else. It doesn't seem to bother Mr. Gephardt that business is already picking up sizable bills for childcare and other family problems, health expenses and spending $210 billion a year to train their own workers. I guess Mr. Gephardt reasons they will hardly notice his proposal to impose a two percent hike in income tax rates for those companies with taxable income over $10 million annually. After all, the Majority Leader reminds us, they'll get workers with higher skills in return!
Q- Business needs people who can think and solve problems. In Australia teaching thinking skills is public policy. Paul MacCready, a engineer-inventor, says only through better thinking can humankind hope to solve the world's problems. How do you feel about it?
A- Thousands of schools are teaching their students how to think, to analyze data, organize thoughts and apply thinking techniques in their lives. Edward De Bono, director of the British Cognitive Research Trust in Cambridge, developed such a program. Studies of Dr. De Bono's methods show, even with small interventions like eight hours spread over four to five weeks, there is significant improvement in student performance in a range of areas. However if the program is not followed consistently, the gains are short term.
Q- I meant to ask if you thought teaching thinking skills is a good idea, how is it done and is it being tried anywhere in this country?
A- I would prefer to see thinking skills developed naturally as a by product of problem solving. Just as a soccer player increases his running speed in pursuit of the ball, so will a student develop thinking skills in tackling real problems.
You asked for my opinion knowing I am not the expert in this area that Dr. De Bono is, but that I have functioned as a participant in developing such skills and observed my own and other young people develop these skills. I would like to see logic, and other philosophy courses introduced into high school curriculums.
That is the admittedly old-fashioned approach to problem solving. However I am more aware than most layman of new approaches to problem solving because one of my sons earned his PhD in cognitive science and is somewhat of an expert in the area of problem solving.
Q- I ran across symbols in Dr De Bono's writings like OPV and PMI. Any ideas?
A- OPV is simply an abbreviation for "others point of view" and PMI is a short-hand admonishment directed to problem solvers to remind them that they must include the plusses and minuses--the pros and cons relevant to any situation.
By the way, Dr. De Bono's method is being used at Memorial Jr. High School in Valley Stream New York.
Q- I remember that Bill Clinton of Arkansas thought Mr. Gephardt's Rewards For Results plan was marvelous and pointed out that the states are already doing about 85 percent of what was laid out as possible goals.
A- Other governors were skeptical, pointing out that no matter what the federal incentive, it could not be as much as such a program would cost.
Q- You mean the states would be saddled with a pretty heavy tab in the final analysis?
A- You've got it; and the states are already strapped for funds. Indeed, James Martin of North Carolina tried to get Congressman Gephardt to intercede on the Hill for a delay for the states in the increased funding they were being asked to come up with for the Medicaid program.