Your Kids Aren't Learning. At all.

Your local public school is actively defrauding your family.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in state-run schools in California.

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On graduation day, 2014, I had a spectacular breakdown at work. Two of my colleagues watched as I ugly-cried at my desk from the end of minimum day until I put on my gown to walk the seniors down to their seats on the football field. There they would wait to shake the superintendent’s hand as he defrauded the entire audience by handing their beloved young men and women diplomas signifying those kids could read, write, speak, and calculate.

Like so many teachers, I didn’t blame the school system at the time; I chalked it up to social, economic, psychological, and other factors the school couldn’t address in our very poor, mainly immigrant-populated district.

But when I moved to a school that served some of the wealthiest families in our metro area, it was the same damned story.

Many kids were functionally illiterate and innumerate. The writing of 9th-12th graders in English was often incoherent, full of fragment sentences and errors in English grammar, usage, and mechanics. Students couldn’t seem to organize their thoughts meaningfully and employed little vocabulary beyond the 6th grade level. Only the most proficient and frequent readers produced work that didn’t require major revision. Students didn’t know enough about Western civ to turn out an intelligent paper on any piece of literature, whether novel, short story, or poem. They hadn’t read enough in any genre to have a working model of how to produce good, clear writing.

Math didn’t look much better. Every AP Econ class I taught at that school audibly gasped when told calculators weren’t allowed on Econ tests, which at most require knowledge of basic arithmetic. (Many kids struggled to finish timed tests because of this rule.) One of the hardest-working seniors in my class last year, a 17-year-old from a wealthy, supportive family, needed help multiplying two-digit integers; he wasn’t sure what to do with carried numbers.

I cannot stress this enough: wealthy AP students with professional parents living in safe neighborhoods have poor command of grammar, small vocabularies, and a strong proclivity to try to hide all of that by using the passive voice and the thesaurus — to often hilarious effect; I can’t tell you the number of times I saw Inigo Montoya in my head saying “I do not think that word means what you think it means” while grading essays.

Colleges are well aware of the fact that at least 25% of American high school students are functionally illiterate and innumerate, since many of that number do, in fact, go on to higher education where 40 to 60% of all college students need remediation in math or English or both.

I spent 20 years teaching in schools that matriculated these kids with zero compunction. Federal and state policy incentivize high pass rates, especially for students of color or from disadvantaged backgrounds, and no principal is going to hold rich kids (with their litigious parents) to a higher standard. At the same time, state governments failed to implement an accountability system that set targets for minimum demonstrated competence in reading, writing, speaking, and calculating, or a test measuring basic scientific and historical knowledge.

What does all this mean?

By claiming to educate your child, public school is defrauding your family.

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The main metric school leadership employs to determine whether or not the school is successful is whether or not kids keep showing up. The Average Daily Attendance (ADA) number is everything to your typical public school principal because attendance determines school funding.

Based on the number of adults who continue to leave their kids in the care of relative strangers all day, most parents still trust local public schools as a daycare option at least.

However, the growing exodus from conventional public schools for homeschool, micro-schools, public charters, hybrid in-person/online and fully online school demonstrates that families no longer take it on faith that their local public school is a safe place where children will learn to read, write, calculate and generally gain the knowledge required for success in their community.

While every teacher believes she is successful to some extent, she will almost certainly rationalize low student achievement as a failure of parents, their culture, and/or society at large, not as a breakdown of her training, her practice, or school policy.

It’s never the school's fault, despite the fact that years and years and billions of dollars demonstrate that what schools are doing is not helping and might actually be hurting students.

I discussed test scores and what they indicate - in my state of California at least - at length here, and what lessons your kids actually learn in school here, and the incentive structures that create this problem here; I don’t want to belabor those points.

This time, I want to help parents understand the difference between what learning actually is and what schools pretend “learning” is today.

Knowledge and skill are the result of learning.

Knowledge is gained from repeated exposure to information. Information transforms into knowledge when a person has had multiple touch points with the information; the more meaningful the connection, the more likely it will be recalled. The very structure of the modern K12 system makes connecting different disciplines meaningfully through curriculum, pacing, or instruction nearly impossible. Delivering information at scale to a huge number of learners with enormously disparate skillsets and widely varying backgrounds makes any coordination between teachers nearly impossible.

But information delivery does not equal learning. It’s not really teaching either.

Skill, on the other hand, must be developed, step-by-step, mostly through failure. The quickness and quality of skill development depends on the quality and immediacy of the corrective feedback a student receives. It also depends on the student’s willingness to re-engage after failing. It is also dependent upon the number and level of students in a classroom. If the students in a class are widely different in foundational skills, the teacher has to be a master of differentiation as well as an expert at time management and an incredibly quick thinker with a huge basket of tools and strategies in order to give different learners an appropriate sub-task to ensure they make progress toward mastery. Think John Wooden, but remember: he had fewer people to coach and more daily hours in which to train them.

So let’s talk about information delivery in conventional public high schools.

Teachers are supposed to stick to prescribed standards, even though in California (as in many other states with strong teachers’ unions), tenure grants pedagogical freedom that makes it near impossible to fire a teacher for going off-piste which is why the most politically vocal teachers have so much leeway.

There’s a subtle shift in many schools to focusing less on knowledge and more on development of literacy “skills” across the curriculum. Why?

Because K12 education roundly fails on inculcating knowledge in kids. Watch any “man on the street” interview — Jay Leno was famous for them — to see just how much information the average American retains from high school.

Bleak, isn’t it? Well, over the next few posts, I’ll discuss the reasons why the public school system has failed to teach American kids much about anything, despite requiring that they spend upwards of 16,000 hours locked in schoolrooms “learning”.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Teachers aren’t subject matter experts.

2. The public school system has totally disincentivized reading.

3. Study guides are crippling kids academically.

4. Skills-Based learning and Equitable Grading policies are fraudulent educational practices.

This is going to be really uncomfortable, so settle in with a cozy blanket and start thinking about any fat you can trim from your budget to de-school your kid.

Take it from me, beans and rice are nutritious. Add a rich discussion of history and science and literature, and you make them delicious.