Are American Educators Living in a Fantasy World? A review of “Real Education” by Charles Murray

I enjoy reading books by Charles Murray. Although he identifies himself as a libertarian conservative, he’s an independent thinker. His books The Bell Curve and Human Accomplishment are examples of his unique perspective. A central point of the The Bell Curve is that intelligence, which is determined by genes and early childhood experience, is a major factor in determining who succeeds in life and who doesn’t. Since whether a man is intelligent or not is outside of his control, there’s no basis for the libertarian argument that those who are financially successful have “earned” their money. A less intelligent person can work just as hard as a more intelligent one, sometimes harder, but only make a fraction of what the smart person is making. In Human Accomplishment, which celebrates past creative achievements in the arts and sciences, Murray doesn’t find any correlation between political/economic freedom and rate of achievement. I’d expect a conservative writer to argue that living in a free and democratic society promotes achievement, but that would ignore the facts of history. Most great achievement occurred by men living in monarchies and aristocracies that had very little freedom or liberty in the modern sense.

In his latest book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Murray again stakes out an independent position. While one would expect a conservative writer to extol the virtues of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, Murray is very critical of it. Murray also is realistic about the limitations of conservative initiatives such as school choice, charter schools, and tuition vouchers.

Murray’s 4 simple educational truths are:

1. Ability varies
2. Half of the children are below average
3. Too many people are going to college
4. America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted

I’ll discuss Murray’s arguments for each of these truths. In the case of “ability varies,” Murray focuses on academic ability, which correlates highly with intelligence. The simple truth is that “half of the children are below average” in academic ability. Research has shown that there’s a normal (“bell curve”) distribution of academic ability. It follows that half the children will be on the left side of the bell curve, i.e. below average.

Murray next argues that there’s not much that schools can do to improve performance of below-average ability children. This is much more controversial than the statement that half of the children are below average. Murray presents actual questions from standardized tests that below-average ability children have problems answering. These are pretty simple questions, and it’s surprising that so many children have difficulties with them. The fact that they can’t answer them, however, could be indicative of a problem with the schools, not their lack of intelligence.

Murray then discusses various programs designed to improve students’ test scores, including preschool programs (Abecedarian Project and Infant Health and Development Program), and elementary/secondary school programs (Title I and No Child Left Behind). His conclusion is that these programs produced little to no improvement in student achievement. His case is bolstered by the results of the Coleman Report, which studied the effects of inequality of educational opportunity on student achievement. The Coleman Report found that quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Family background is more important a determiner of student achievement than any educational measure. What about the terrible quality of many American public schools, including chaotic and sometimes violent classrooms, incompetent teachers, low standards, and dearth of teaching resources such as textbooks and computers? Murray states that these “worst of the worst” inner-city schools only affect about 2 to 3 percent of all students. Based on the failure of programs to improve test scores, the results of the Coleman Report, and the small percentage of students attending failing public schools, Murray says that “[t]o continue to assert that major improvements are possible in the academic test performance of the lower half of the distribution through reform of the public schools is more than a triumph of hope over experience. It ignores experience altogether. It is educational romanticism” (p. 62).

I have a few criticisms of Murray’s argument. The first has to do with the way the book is structured. In a chapter that focuses on below-average students, Murray makes his case that schools can’t do much to lift student achievement. Murray separately discusses gifted children in another chapter. He doesn’t have much to say, however, about average and above-average (but not gifted) children. Wouldn’t better schools help improve scores of average and above-average students? Wouldn’t these students have more potential to achieve than below-average students?

I’m also not convinced that schools can’t do better for below-average students. Murray says that failing public schools only affect 2 to 3 percent of all students. But these are the “worst of the worst”, the most extreme examples of poor schools. Is he implying that no other public schools have problems with lack of discipline, gangs, violence, incompetent teachers, and low standards? In other words, that 97% of American public schools today have absolutely no problems? I think that many schools have similar problems, but not just as extreme as the worst of the worst inner city schools. Students in these moderately bad schools can perform better if their schools had higher standards.

In a book on education, it’s surprising that Murray ignores international comparisons. I constantly read articles and charts showing how poorly American students compare to students in some other countries. Based on his argument that schools can’t do much to lift ability, it follows logically that the reason why Singaporean students perform so much better than American students is that their students are a lot smarter than ours are. This might be true, but I would have liked to see Murray discuss this in his book. Is the fact that Singaporean public schools have very high standards, excellent teachers, a demanding curriculum, and no discipline problems completely unrelated to the fact that Singaporean students score higher than American students? I find it hard to believe.

Murray’s next educational truth is that too many people are going to college. He makes some good arguments that many people, including some who have the ability to get a bachelor’s degree, would do better in some other type of post-secondary education. He uses an example of a young man deciding whether to become an electrician or white-collar manager. He’s smart enough to get his bachelor’s degree in business, but is this the right choice? He has special small-motor and spatial skills that would make him a good electrician. He’d probably be an average manager. Based on his abilities, interests, and future career opportunities (mediocre managers are much more likely to be laid off than top electricians), becoming an electrician would be a good option. In fact, skilled technicians and artisans are in high demand even in this recession, while many white collar jobs have been downsized and outsourced.

There are many students such as the one described in the above paragraph, who choose a 4-year college over other options (e.g. technical school, community college, or apprenticeship). The reason why they choose college is that their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors push them in this direction. The reason why adults push children into college is that our society has made the bachelor’s degree a requirement for professional success. Murray questions this cultural worship of the bachelor’s degree. There are some for whom college is appropriate. This includes good math and science students who major in engineering and the hard sciences. It also includes good students who want to study pre-med or pre-law. But for the vast majority of students, especially those who become liberal arts or business majors, college is not the best option. It’s not good for their personal development, as they don’t learn much self-discipline or self-restraint with their light workload or partying lifestyle. It’s not good for their professional development, as their BA degree doesn’t give them the specific skills to get good jobs after they graduate. When I graduated college over 20 years ago, I was basically a liberal arts major with no job skills. My first job out of college was a management trainee at a shoe store. I eventually got a job at a computer help desk, which gave me my start in IT, but it was at near-minimum wage. Today, it’s even tougher for liberal arts majors. The recession has hit them especially hard, leaving them with a lot of student debt and little opportunity for a good job.

Murray next discusses education of the gifted. America’s future depends on the (unelected) intellectual elite, those who have risen to the top jobs that directly impact the nation’s culture, economy, and politics, along with those who influence smaller communities. “The members of the elite are drawn overwhelmingly from the academically gifted. We had better make sure that we do the best possible job of educating them” (p. 107).

Gifted children should be allowed to advance at their own pace, not be held back by their peers. This could include skipping grades, or getting advanced material within their age-appropriate grade. I found myself unchallenged as a gifted public school student, and would have been better off being pushed to take more demanding classes.

Murray focuses on training the gifted to be good citizens. This training should continue through college. “We need to structure their education so that they have the best possible chance to become not just knowledgeable but wise” (p. 112). Murray’s wisdom training of the gifted includes improving their verbal skills, teaching them how to make sound judgments, teaching them how to think about ethical issues, and teaching them humility. I’ll discuss each of these points below:

• Verbal skills—SAT-Verbal scores never recovered from their decline in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. SAT-Math scores did recover, indicating that educational priorities led to a toughening of the math and sciences curriculum. These priorities didn’t result in improvement in humanities and social sciences education, fields that depend heavily on verbal skills. Part of this failure to teach verbal skills is a result of the progressive education movement, which emphasized creative self-expression over correct spelling and grammar. When I was in high school in the early and mid-1980’s, my school had very good math teachers, but mediocre English and social sciences teachers.
• Sound judgments—Members of the elite make decisions all the time, judgments that affect the culture and nation. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq still impacts us eight years later. When music company executives decide to sign a gangster rap artist, and ignore a quality musician, they weaken our culture a notch. When the FDA approves a psychiatric drug for children that has been inadequately tested, it jeopardizes our children’s mental health and development. Some components of sound judgment are unteachable, such as intuition and common sense. A teachable component includes how to evaluate data, especially the knowledge of basic statistics. Another one is pattern recognition, including knowledge of history. Personal and vicarious experience is also important in being able to see patterns in different situations.
• Ethical issues—Schools used to teach morality and virtue. Today, there is a widespread moral vacuum at all levels of education. This moral vacuum leads to nonjudgmentalism and ethical illiteracy. While there is more tolerance today than ever before, this tolerance extends to behavior that should not be acceptable in any society, including greed, selfishness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, and intemperance. It’s the function of the intellectual elite to help promote ethical behavior by example, by policy, and by writing and speaking. The default of the elite in this area has led to anomie and anarchy. We need to teach the gifted about virtue and ethics. This can be done by using examples from the great religious traditions and secular philosophers. These traditions and philosophies are in remarkable agreement on core issues (e.g. “the golden rule”).
• Humility—The self-esteem and individual rights movements have led to a widespread decline in student humility and personal responsibility. If a student gets a bad grade, it’s not his fault, but the fault of his teacher. The teacher is violating his “right” to a good grade. Students are supposed to feel good about themselves, no matter what they do or how well they perform academically. Criticism should be avoided at all cost. Research has shown that improving self-esteem doesn’t raise grades, promote good achievement, or have any positive effect. While there’s nothing wrong with praising gifted children for their successes, there’s nothing wrong with criticizing them for their failings, either. Many parents and teachers do the former, but not the latter. To gain perspective, and acquire humility, the gifted need to be challenged enough so that they fail sometimes. A little humility goes a long way in promoting sound judgments and ethical behavior.

In conclusion, Real Education provides a different and valuable perspective on the failings in American schools. We need to be more realistic about the capabilities of below-average students, we need to offer more students an alternative to college, and we need to provide better wisdom-training of the gifted. I feel that Murray is too pessimistic about the capability of public schools to improve student academic performance, especially for average and above-average students. I recommend this book as an independent perspective on American education.

How Did “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” Become the Land of Lawyers and the Home of Bureaucrats? A Review of “Life Without Lawyers” by Philip K. Howard

In these recessionary times, Americans are divided along partisan lines on many important issues, such as whether to give tax breaks to the rich versus extending unemployment benefits. Democrats and Republicans argue about government spending, taxation, health care reform, immigration, foreign wars, and a host of other issues. But away from the spotlight of media attention and political debate is a cancer that has gnawed away at the social fabric of American society. This cancer has been growing for the last four decades, and shows no signs of improvement. I am speaking about the litigation and regulation explosion that has reduced Americans' ability to take risks, exercise authority, fire incompetent employees, maintain discipline in schools, and to take responsibility for their actions. The tragic part of this is that there is a bipartisan consensus for reform that is stymied by self-serving special interests such as trial lawyers and public-sector unions. Philip K. Howard takes up this issue in his latest book Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America

Howard, author of the best-selling The Death of Common Sense, has talked about the issue of excessive and nonsensical lawsuits and regulation in previous books. Since the problem hasn’t gotten any better, Howard revisits these issues, presenting newer examples, but also suggesting solutions. He also is trying to improve things via his organization Common Good.

There are two main points in the book. One, is that there are too many rules prescribing how to do things. These rules derive from the assembly-line mentality that arose from the Industrial Revolution. While some rules are necessary in any complex endeavor, such as a business, government, or school, our society has gone overboard with rules and organization. Too many rules stifle individual initiative and decision making. Howard presents many examples of this in the public schools. Teachers in New York City are forbidden from calling on students who raise their hands during the first part of class. A mother of a third grader, who arrived with a supply of birthday cupcakes, was turned away because there is a rule against parents in the classroom. Teachers write out detailed course plans every week that no one ever reads. Loudspeakers constantly blare out announcements, interrupting classes and making it impossible for teachers and students to concentrate. No Child Left Behind made things worse by focusing on standardized testing. Teachers’ union contracts dictate hours worked, limit teacher duties, and make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent teachers. Paint crumbles at the top of walls in some New York City schools because unions prohibit painting walls higher than ten feet.

The second main point is that since the 1960’s individual rights have trumped concerns over the common good. “Let any individual who feels aggrieved bring a legal claim for almost anything” (p. 23). This mindset arose from a desire to remedy abuses due to racial and gender discrimination. The problem is, however, that “[u]nlike constitutional rights, which shield citizens from state power, these new rights gave citizens a sword against other free citizens” (p. 23). It isn’t hard to find examples of how citizens utilize lawsuits as swords against other citizens. In 2007, a Washington, D.C. lawyer sued his dry cleaner for $54 million because he claimed that they lost a pair of pants. This idiotic and absurd case, which should have been immediately dismissed, was allowed to go on for more than two years, costing the family owning the dry cleaner over $100,000 in legal fees. While they won the case, they ended up having to close the store. Another example is a medical malpractice case. A dermatologist advised a patient to remove skin based on a biopsy indicating malignancy. The patient got a second opinion which indicated no malignancy, and didn’t get the skin removed. After getting terminal cancer several years later, the patient sued the first doctor on the basis that the doctor should have been more insistent about getting the skin removed. While the doctor prevailed in the case after seven years of legal battling, it could hardly be called a victory.

The result of out-of-control lawsuits is that Americans don’t trust the justice system anymore. They become defensive in their behavior, refusing to take risks out of fear of being sued. The most familiar and costly example of defensive behavior is in the field of medicine. Unnecessary care accounts for 30% of total health care spending. Nursing homes send dying ninety-year-olds to intensive care units, so that they can’t be sued for negligence in the person's death. Doctors have to document everything, in case they have to justify their decisions in court. Minor surgeries require expensive and unnecessary preoperative tests to prevent the providers from being sued.

The threat of lawsuits, combined with burdensome regulation, has eroded discipline in public schools. In a 2001 survey, 43% of high school teachers said they spent more time maintaining order than teaching. One in seven teachers in urban schools has been physically assaulted by his students. In New York City more than 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a student for over 5 days. “Just sending a disruptive student out of the classroom requires layers of bureaucratic compliance” (p. 104). A violent autistic child in Hartford, CT, was kept in a regular classroom because his parents, exercising their rights under federal law, refused to allow him to be transferred to special ed. The school had to institute formal legal proceedings and receive a judge’s order to remove the disruptive child. After 2 years of hearings and thousands of dollars of expense, the school finally received the order to move the child.

Howard uses the “broken windows” analogy to explain how this erosion of discipline has harmed schools. If broken windows in a building aren’t fixed, the tendency is for vandals to break more windows, and eventually break into the building. After a few unchecked incidents, disorder takes over a school. “Young people aren’t known for their maturity, and pushing the envelope becomes a sport” (p. 105). Zero tolerance rules, which were supposed to counteract school disorder, only make things worse. The problem with these rules is that they can’t distinguish trivial from severe infractions. In 2001, a National Merit scholar in a Florida high school was suspended because of a small kitchen knife found in the back seat of her car on school grounds. “Instead of bolstering school authority, zero tolerance rules have become a symbol of lack of authority to do what’s right” (p. 106).

The fear and distrust of authority that began in the 1960’s was a major factor that led to our current legalistic mess. We tried to outlaw any type of discretion by people in positions of authority—teachers, administrators, managers, and government executives—by replacing this discretion with a tangle of rules and threats of litigation. But there is no substitute for good judgment, and good judgment relies on subjective and intuitive factors. Having to prove the correctness of decisions in legal proceedings leads to worse decisions. It’s true that people can explain why they did something, but only to a point. These explanations rarely rise to the level of legal proof.

“The alternative to absolute rights is not absolute discretion” (p. 58). Legislatures can establish clear public goals, and give officials the responsibility to achieve these goals. But meeting these goals requires the use of individual judgment, such as the decision that a student is too violent to be mainstreamed. People in power will at times make mistakes, and they should be held accountable for their mistakes. But trying to prescribe decisions by legal rule is a self-defeating way to organize our society.

Some specific reforms that Howard advocates include:

1) Judges must draw legal boundaries of reasonableness as they pertain to lawsuits. The “lost pants” type of lawsuit should be immediately dismissed. For other suits that aren’t obviously ridiculous, judges need to take into account whether a claim might undermine reasonable activities of people not in the courtroom. For example, the threat of lawsuits has resulted in playgrounds being stripped of fun equipment. Many schools have eliminated recess, and parents are afraid to allow their children to engage in unstructured play. As a result of these changes, children today spend much of their time in front of television and computer screens. This lack of exercise is one important factor in the obesity epidemic plaguing our nation’s youth. By trying to eliminate risky behavior among children, we’ve succeeded in making many of them fat, a health problem which will eventually cause much more suffering and death than an occasional accident.

2) Special courts are needed for medical malpractice claims. The problem isn’t the setting of standards of care. The problem is finding courts that are trusted to uphold these standards. Allowing medical malpractice claims to be heard in regular courts, with greedy trial lawyers manipulating clueless juries, has led to an explosion of defensive medicine. Special courts for medical malpractice would have the following characteristics: judges dedicated to health care claims, written judicial opinions rather than jury verdicts, neutral experts in place of hired guns, and expedited proceedings with incentives for early settlements.

3) Abandon the due process model for social services, especially public schools. Daily choices in schools and other public institutions need to be made by teachers and administrators with the freedom to use their judgment, without fear of lawsuit. These choices should not be determined by burdensome detailed regulation. In successful private and charter schools, teachers and principals are free to do what they think is best for their students. For public schools to succeed, their teachers and principals need the same freedom. This freedom includes the freedom of school administrators to fire incompetent teachers.

4) Don’t tolerate disorder in public schools. Principals and teachers need the authority to promptly remove disruptive students without worrying about following regulations or being sued by parents. Some students are too disruptive or violent to be mainstreamed, and they need to be removed from the regular classroom. Allowing individual students to disrupt classes makes it very difficult to properly educate the other students. While one student and his parents may win, everyone else loses. This individualistic and selfish model needs to change.

5) Discrimination cases should only be allowed for systematic practices of discrimination. This was the original purpose of discrimination laws, which since the 1960’s have been corrupted by greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible minority advocates. If a minority feels he’s being discriminated against, his lawsuit would be dismissed unless he can present evidence that the employer discriminates against minorities in general. Individuals should not be allowed to bring claims only on behalf of themselves. An exception is for individual claims of sexual harassment, but only if they rise to the level of quid pro quo.

6) Washington needs to be fixed from the outside. Partisan politics and special interests have made it impossible for our representatives to achieve any important changes in the areas that Howard talks about. As with the No Child Left Behind law, they just pile layers of legal concrete on people and institutions that are already crushed by law. We must form a national coalition of citizen leaders, a shadow government, to propose an overhaul of government. The models for this are the base-closing commissions in the 1990’s, or the current deficit-reduction commissions. To effect change, public opinion must be mobilized in a way that it hasn’t been since the 1960’s. “America doesn’t need a new Constitution, just a healthy spring cleaning and a practical approach to making public choices without crushing us under endless law” (p. 177).

The only problem with this book is that it lacks an index. I don’t remember ever reading a nonfiction book without an index.

Due to excessive regulation and litigation, America in the early 21st century is a shell of its former self. We’ve become afraid to take risks, afraid to use our judgment, and afraid to do what we think is right. Is this the type of mentality that motivated the early pioneers, people who risked everything to settle an unknown and sometimes hostile country? Is this the type of mentality that motivated the great American inventors, entrepreneurs, and other creative people? Would Edison have invented the light bulb if he was afraid of being sued by the candle makers? Would Tesla have invented A/C electric power if he was afraid of being sued by the family of the rare person who was electrocuted? Would railroads, cars, and planes have been invented and made available to the masses if companies were afraid of being sued due to accidents? Would America have risen to a leadership position among nations if its public schools were always in the sorry shape they are in today? Would a legal and political system have been a model to the world if it allowed a greedy scumbag to sue his dry cleaner for $54 million dollars?

The problems that Howard describes in his book are not the only problems that America faces. Obviously, we need to be concerned about other things, including the recession, our government’s long-term fiscal health, and the threat of terrorism. But overregulation and overlitigation, although less publicized, nevertheless affect Americans in their daily lives—in their schools, workplaces, doctors offices, hospitals, and even their homes. The cost in money, worry, wasted time, and unhealthy behavior is severe. I recommend “Life Without Lawyers” to all Americans.