The Bogeyman

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Di Website Kesayangam Anda
bandarq onlineI feel as though all I have been doing for the last week is shoveling snow, scraping ice, and fixing my snow blower, which broke twice. I had such ice build up at the base of my house along the driveway—a good six inches thick in places—that I had to chop it up with an ax and then shovel it up. Not exactly my idea of a break. Though the Continued Funding Application for the National Writing Project grant pretty much wipes out any semblance of a break for me. I just get a reprieve from students for a month. That said, I was supposed to meet my new students yesterday but snow closed down the university and so I won’t be meeting them till Thursday. I know I don’t have to make up the snow day in June like most of you reading this, but when you only meet your students twenty-eight times, losing a whole class is tough. I’ll have to condense the first two classes into one and make do.

So I spent the day preparing for my first class tomorrow, thinking of ways to combine yesterday’s cancelled class with tomorrow’s class, and when I got home from work I read an editorial by Trudy Rubin that was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s main argument is that the United States must invest in education because we are currently threatened by the growing militaristic, economic, and educational power of the Chinese. The article goes on to delineate the waning power of the US, the relatively low rank of our students world wide in various categories, and the fact that China will soon have more English speakers and more engineers than the US.

I couldn’t help thinking that I had read some version of this article many times before, only in previous versions disseminated in previous years the threat was posed by the Japanese or, before that, the Soviets. Sometimes the threat is posed by India, which this column also mentioned tangentially.

Not to be too dismissive of the rise of China, but I couldn’t help wondering why we need to invoke a bogeyman to justify a financial investment in education. I kept thinking, Shouldn’t we be investing in education because our students need to be educated, and not because we need to make more money, build bigger fighter jets, and produce more engineers than some other country, any other country? Why do we need to be frightened or provoked into educating our students? Why does a xenophobic argument pass muster as educational policy? Trudy Rubin actually concludes her column by saying that if we don’t begin producing “the best-educated workers,” then “China will roll past us no matter how many missiles we build.”

The other thing that struck me in Rubin’s article is her questionable use of world educational rankings to demonstrate that US students rank far below their peers in other developed nations, and are falling farther—fast. Rubin herself admits that it is difficult if not specious to compare data from US students with data from narrow samples provided by the Chinese government itself. Noting the “questionable” usefulness of this data, she even resorts to relying on her own subjective observations of Asian students in her classes to support her argument, noting that they are her most “driven” students. I kept thinking, let me get this straight: China will roll over us economically because your Korean- and Japanese- and East Asian-American students work hard for their A’s? Not exactly a sound argument, and more than a little troubling for various reasons.

Perhaps instead we should focus on some of the real problems in US education. For one, I bet that if we took the data we use for those national rankings and subdivided it according to race, ethnicity, and other demographic markers we would find very different results. I’m willing to bet that our mostly white suburban students perform as well or better than any students from anywhere in the world, and that our mostly African- and Latin-American urban students perform very poorly. If this is the case, as I think it is, then our focus should not be on producing engineers to roll over the Chinese but on improving education for our African- and Latin-American students, and urban students in general.

To me, the biggest tragedy or impending disaster is not that China might some day have a higher GDP than the US, but that our African-American students, in particular, experience such seemingly intractable problems, that they perpetually receive the lowest quality education, and are so often mired in generational poverty. I am also concerned with Latin- and Southeast Asian-American students. Although it seems to me that many of these students are going through an immigrant experience similar to those encountered by earlier generations of European and East Asian immigrants, and that problems such as low quality education and generational poverty will not last in perpetuity but for only a generation or so, students from these groups clearly struggle with acquiring English language skills, and the pelatihan our teachers receive in this area does not adequately address this large and growing need. I think we need to spend more time, money, and effort on English language instruction for these students than Chinese language instruction for our future engineers.

My point here is not to split hairs among ethnic groups, but to take odds with Rubin’s argument. There shouldn’t be a need for such fear-mongering, xenophobic justifications for improved educational funding. And in any rush to improve education for US students, let’s keep our attention on our very real needs, such as urban education, education for African-American students, and ELL instruction. Let’s not worry about how many engineers China is producing, but concentrate on providing better education for all our students. Forget the bogeymen out there and worry about the elephant in the room here among us.

Something to think about as we clear the snow and head into the spring semester.