Undue fanfare for higher education for all

This school year is winding down, but administrators are already whistling next year’s welcome-back in-service fanfares.

At some point during each of these opening-day sessions, some speaker or other always declares that all students can succeed and meet high standards. I’m sure I’m not the only teacher who’s almost stood up and protested, “No, they can’t.”

The “college for all” initiative carries this guaranty of universal success to its illogical extreme. It also offers a window into how well-intentioned education follies gain momentum in the face of common sense.

Some people aren’t suited for college. Some students aren’t willing to make the necessary effort, while others legitimately lack the ability or interest in advanced academic study.

Assuming you landed here from another planet, it would probably take just a few trips to your local school or supermarket to draw that commonsense conclusion, the same way it would take around five minutes to deduce that I’m not likely to qualify as an Olympic gymnast or win a tango competition.

Back in 2004, when No Child Left Behind was already unraveling, the National Governors Association decided that NCLB’s impossible mandate that all students graduate academically proficient wasn’t impossible enough.

The governors proclaimed that all students would graduate “college ready.”

It’s remarkable how politicians who can’t ensure success for all their constituents can glibly offer my guarantee of success for all my students.

The following year Bill Gates keynoted the governors’ annual summit. After humbly acknowledging, “I’m not here to pose as an education expert,” Mr. Gates launched into a “scathing critique of U.S. high schools,” blaming them for everything from arrest and welfare rates to teenage pregnancy. Mr. Gates concluded by echoing the assertion that “every kid can graduate ready for college.”

Imagine how much more he might have said if he’d considered himself an expert. It almost makes me want to pretend to write computer code.

Midway through the Obama administration, Harvard’s “esteemed school of education” complicated matters by determining that public schools should offer students “diverse academic paths” and programs based on their abilities and interests rather than a “college for all” program of studies.

If you’re wondering why something so obvious and reasonable should qualify as an education headline, education experts specialize in alternately ignoring and rediscovering the obvious.

Critics of Harvard’s study complained that recognizing differences in students’ aptitudes and interests and placing them in courses accordingly would consign “disproportionate numbers of poor kids and kids of color” to “watered-down programs that curtail their prospects.”

The author of the study, a “champion of higher academic expectations for all students,” countered that while schools shouldn’t dictate young children’s futures, older students’ “families have some real choices to make” regarding course selection and careers. Those choices need to be “informed.”

No qualified candidates should miss out on college because of race. And it may be in our national interest to subsidize talented students who can’t afford a university education. But that doesn’t mean all students are, or ever will be, capable of earning a college degree, unless we so degrade college that a degree becomes as worthless as many high school diplomas have become.

Cheerleader hyperbole, rhetorical fictions like “college for every student” and statutes with mendacious titles like No Child Left Behind cripple efforts to improve public education because they divert attention and resources from realistic, honest goals and the hard work required of students to attain them.

You can’t entirely blame students for regarding college as a post-diploma entitlement. Former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano advocated the “highest possible standards” in her 2007 speech to the governors.

When she allowed students who didn’t pass her state’s graduation exam to graduate anyway, she was applauded by one spotlighted senior who’d failed the math exam just because she “doesn’t understand math.” This newly minted graduate objected to strict graduation standards because “I’m being penalized for something I’m not good at.”

Please note: Denying me credit for something I can’t do isn’t unfair.

Some advocates endorse an alternative showcased before the governors several years later as a “revolutionary approach to high school.” These experts envision schools that offer more rigorous academic courses for college-bound students, as well as training programs that lead to valid technical certificates for students “going straight to work after graduation.”

That plan sounds sensible, but it’s hardly a revolution. It’s pretty much the way schools used to work before modern reformers outlawed ability grouping and ordered schools to pretend that all students were equally able to learn the same things at the same time in the same place.

Critics uncomfortable with grouping students according to their abilities and prospective careers contend that whether students are headed for apprenticeships, community colleges or four-year universities, they needn’t be in separate classes because “they all study the same things.”

Other college-for-all advocates have simply redefined college to mean “some form of training after high school.”

Redefining college doesn’t mean that everybody’s going there. And while butchers and surgeons both study anatomy, no reasonable person would claim they really study “the same thing.”

Neither should anyone argue that one-class-fits-all is the soundest, most efficient method for turning out successful butchers or surgeons. That practical reality operates in every classroom.

Word games and pipe dreams that run counter to common sense won’t save us or our schools.

We need to remember this when we hear next year’s welcome-back fanfares.