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Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on Excellence

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The day before I wrote this review, New York Newsday published a telling story about education in New York City. Teachers in multiple subject areas were nearing open revolt over being forced to adopt the latest pedagogical fad, something called the "workshop model" that limits instructors to just ten minutes of direct instruction each period. Students are then supposed to work in groups for 25 minutes, after which the teacher is granted a five-minute closing. In some schools, administrators were actually "writing teachers up" for not adhering to the workshop model, the equivalent of a formal reprimand.

How can anyone teach chemistry or physics or math with just ten minutes of daily lecture time? Martin Rochester would no doubt happily cite New York's implementation of the "workshop model" as another instance of progressive miseducation. In his book CLASS WARFARE, Rochester takes on the progressive education establishment, represented in large part by school boards and university schools of education. In the author's view, the war is between traditionalist parents and progressive educators, and he sees the parents (and their children) losing most of the battles.

Rochester draws heavily on first-hand experience as an activist parent in the Clayton school district, near St. Louis, where he estimates he has attended 275 out of 280 school board meetings since 1988. He also bases his arguments on observations of students' work at University of Missouri - St. Louis, where he is a professor of political science. Over the course of five core chapters, he tackles the big issues of modern pre-collegiate education: ability grouping (or tracking), multiple intelligences theory, the self-esteem movement, "back to basics" versus fuzzy math and whole language instruction, and the teacher-as-facilitator model of constructivist education. In each case, he sees these approaches as lowering standards and expectations, teaching to the bottom and suppressing the top, and avoiding conflict and accountability. Rochester approaches each topic with an entertaining and informative mixture of published sources, expert opinion, and personal anecdotes.

CLASS WARFARE contains some powerful and important messages about the American public school system. Having said that, it is important to note that his message comes in a badly flawed package. To begin with, Rochester's approach is one-sided in the extreme, as if all progressive ideas were equally deleterious to American education, without any redeeming qualities. Having taught math in a New York City high school for six years, and being a traditionalist myself, I can say with absolute certainty that such a position is wrong.

Second, the author's tone is far too cynical, packed with bitter sarcasm, ad hominem attacks, and nonsensical slippery slope arguments that weaken his case. Instead of the balanced critical voice of a Diane Ravitch, Rochester comes off as a barely subdued version of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly. Consider for example, his dismissal of Rousseau's views of pedagogy by accusing the eighteenth century philosopher of "abandoning all five of his children while they were infants," a typically Limbaugh-style ad hominem attack. Or his childishly petty categorization of a statement by Bob Clapp, an instructional technology specialist at U of M - St. Louis, as "clap-trap." Or, "if NCTM had told these folks to jump off a cliff, they would have done it, but not before telling us what a wonderful idea it was." Or that "some of the people behind these reforms may well have been hit in the head by one dodgeball too many when they were youngsters...." Or his corny adoption of the name "Deep Rote" to identify his insider source in the St. Louise school district.

Third, after spending seven chapters trashing every progressive notion about education from the last fifty or more years, Rochester's sudden call in Chapter 8 for a "balanced pedagogical paradigm" stands in sharp contrast to the preceding 220 pages of his book. More insidiously, his solution includes a strong but undefended recommendation for school vouchers, not on the grounds of pedagogy, but on the democratic grounds of increased choice. Perhaps his real agenda sneaks out in this last chapter when he (inadvertently?) refers to public schools as "government schools" (page 236) and when he says on page 227 that public schools "are likely to remain the primary educational service provider in America for years to come." Likely? One can hardly escape the sense that Rochester would prefer otherwise.

Prospective readers should take note that Encounter Books is a highly Conservative publisher, having produced attack books on Hillary Clinton, Noam Chomsky, and most recently, the environmentalist Judi Bari. Encounter is backed by the right wing Bradley Foundation (financial supporter of the classic right-wing smear book, THE REAL ANITA HILL by David Brock as well as THE BELL CURVE) and the Olin Foundation, among others. Nevertheless, many Conservative views on education have merit, and our national education system needs a healthy debate between traditionalist and progressive positions.

Despite its faults, I strongly recommend CLASS WARFARE. Read Martin Rochester's book with a grain of salt, and then do as he has done - attend your community's next Board of Education meeting.

This book exposes the truth about the dumb policies that are ruining our public schools and the power plays that prevent anyone from injecting a little reality into the situation. Parents who want to help improve their local schools ought to read this book first. While the federal government is worried about the terrible schools in the inner cities, the suburban schools are gradually eliminating any pressure for academic excellence at all. The author moved to the suburbs of St. Louis and worked hard to try to see that his children got a rigorous and demanding public school education. This is the story of the bad policies that are obstacles to excellence which spring up overnight like mushrooms in school systems all over our country. Ever wonder why underfunded, technologically behind, uninteresting, traditional Catholic schools are so much more effective at teaching academics? This book will help you see why. Read it and weep.

I teach at both the college and high school level. This book tells the story about why public education is failing.

The United States spends more (per pupil) on education than any other country, yet our children learn less. It isn't getting any better. What are we doing wrong?

Martin Rochester gives the answer. American K-12 education is dominated by schools of education. Originally created in the late 19th Century to meet a need for minimally qualified teachers when primary education became universal, schools of education have survived as a second-class version of higher education, attracting the weakest college students, and teaching them vapid (or plainly nonsensical) ``theories of education'' rather than real subjects like English, history or mathematics.

Worse, the schools of education and their faculty and graduates dominate the credentialing process, which every state requires of its public school teachers. In the 19th century credentialing served to ensure that teachers were minimally literate and numerate; now it has made education into a closed guild controlled by the schools of education. To obtain a credential a prospective teacher must take numerous education courses which indoctrinate her with the values of the education establishment, but which are so time-consuming that they preclude her getting a real education, and keep graduates with serious bachelors degrees from becoming teachers.

The education establishment does even more harm. It is permeated with a variety of fuzzy ideologies (``progressive education'' is a name for some of them) which use attractive slogans (who wouldn't want a teacher to use the ``best practices'' or ``latest research'') but which are complete nonsense. Some of the ideologies and theories are without content (at least, they are hard to pin down), but in practice amount to excuses to avoid hard work (by either the students or the teachers) or honest evaluation. Sometimes ideology becomes an excuse for not concentrating on teaching the things children need to know: how to read and write, the facts of our culture (literature and history) and of the natural world (science and mathematics).

Education professors build their careers on inventing innovations and selling them to schools. As a result the schools have to deal with a continual series of fads. Some of them are simply silly. For example, a ``theory'' called Multiple Intelligences states that athletic or musical talent is a kind of intelligence. These are certainly valuable talents, but why call them ``intelligence'', a term which has a different meaning? It is only confusing, like deciding to call a dollar a ``penny'' and a penny a ``dollar''. It wouldn't make us more prosperous. Good books are replaced by inferior ones simply for the sake of novelty.

Other innovations make education worse, not better. ``New math'', based on an ed professor's fuzzy comprehension of set theory, managed to confuse a generation of pupils, teachers and parents. Set theory is a genuine and serious part of mathematics, but there is a good reason it is taught to mathematics majors at universities, not elementary school children. Doctrinaire insistence on ``whole language'' or ``phonic'' reading instruction has delayed many children's learning to read. Innovation itself takes a great deal of effort, and should only be engaged in when it is certain that it will provide substantial benefits.

Some ideologies cause direct harm. For example, there is an ideology of ``inclusion'' which claims that even disabled or disruptive children should be in regular classrooms. This makes sense for children in wheelchairs, or with similar physical disabilities which do not interfere with learning. But it does not make sense for mentally retarded, or actively disruptive children. One of them can make it impossible for anyone else to learn. Special schools and classrooms are traditionally provided (for example, state schools for the deaf and blind have existed for over 100 years) for students who cannot benefit from a regular classroom, or who would disrupt it. Every child is entitled to an education, but there is no right, legal or moral, to interfere with anyone else's.

Another pernicious ideology denies the fact that different children have different levels of talent, and learn at different speeds. No athletic coach would be so foolish as to pretend that everyone was equally talented and should play on the same team, but when it comes to education, the ideologues deny reality. Rather than assigning children to classes which match their talents and preparation (slow, medium and fast, for example), they are all thrown into the same classroom. An overwhelmed teacher then must neglect the needs of many. It makes no sense, but the ed professors say it must be so, and the schools do what they say.

Schools that stick to teaching succeed; schools upset by frequent redesigns of the curriculum (always based on the ``latest research'') or that try to make children into better or happier human beings fail, both at that and at teaching. The worst thing a school can do is to try to build its pupils' ``self-esteem''. Either they recognize this as nonsense, and learn contempt for the school, or they accept it, and become arrogant ignoramuses, too proud to make the effort to learn.

Education schools and professors engage in ``research'' on education. Unlike research in history, physics, or medicine, ``research'' in education has proven to be completely worthless. Our schools teach less well than they did fifty or a hundred years ago, despite continuous waves of ``research-based'' innovation. No one has discovered a better method of teaching. Most of what comes out of education schools is simply a series of elaborate excuses for not teaching.

Read this book. It will tell you what is wrong with American education, and how to fix it. If you are a parent, demand that your children's schools focus on education, not on making the pupils feel good or curing the ills of society. If you are a teacher, administrator or school board member, it is up to you to fix the schools. It's not easy, but it is simple: stop listening to the ideologues of the ed schools, get out the books, and teach each child all he can learn. Each child, not just the slow ones.

Martin Rochester gives as good a picture as I've read of the absurdity that passes for classroom instruction. A university professor of political science, he decided to volunteer in his children's classrooms. What he found there was intellectual vacancy and "pack pedagogy" embodied in a cult-like adherence to theories like "multiple intelligences" that removes the responsibility of teachers to teach and students to learn. This book tells of the odyssey of one parent to make sense of the intellectual chaos of public education. Rochester is involved in a journey of discovery, but what he discovers is disheartening--for the gifted children starved by the prevailing educational faddism and by the children in the middle and at the bottom who are the supposed beneficiaries of this puffery but fall ever farther behind.

Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids And The Attack On Excellence by J. Martin Rochester (The Curators' Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis) is an unflinching and documented account of contemporary conflicts across America concerning how reading, math, and other subjects are to be taught, how students should be tested, and other policy conflicts with respect to determining the future of the nation's young minds. Professor Rochester (having had his own fair share of scrapes with educators and policy makers as the parent of school-age children), offers both a personal as well as an analytical look at these divisive educational issues. Class Warfare is recommended for being a particularly readable and thought-provoking account which will of informative value for those with an interest in the current educational issues on national, state, and local levels.

Rochester presents some valid thoughts and ideas on education, but his method of sharing these insights is unprofessional and extremely self-serving. Over half of his examples of how education has failed or is failing stems from the experiences he had in Clayton or from anecdotal stories "he has heard." Furthermore, the entire focus of the book centers around the success of the "best and brightest" students, disregarding the social and intellectual impact on the rest of the student population. Schools certainly need to maximize student achievement, as Rochester points out, but not at the expense of other students. Lastly, and most pathetically, Rochester displays his complete ignorance and apathy towards students with special needs, advocating to remove them from the classroom and disparaging those that would push for students with special needs to join their classmates instead of spending their days in seclusion. Apparently these students are not as worthy as his own academically superior children, whose success frequents his claims against education and apparently have everything to do with HIS battles on education reform.

Rochester has such a talent for grating tone that I hated to agree with him, even when he was being reasonable. Luckily, that case didn't come up all that often. Sometimes he had sound notions -- of course it's not reasonable to have a sixth grader do a math assignment that's an essay about his/her "favorite number." But he needlessly denigrates concepts like teaching for multiple talents and writing to different genres/audiences, arguing as though the abuse of these concepts invalidated them entirely. His attempts at joviality are also forced, often rude, and all too frequent. And despite his opening claims to liberalism, he makes claims like, "It was obvious that, in his rush to fairness, the principal had substituted racial quotas and other counting-by-the-numbers for merit." Leaving aside the question of what else one would count by, if not the numbers, the situation as he presents it is not at all *obviously* racially motivated, and the basic assumption that it *must* be hardly seems to fit any kind of liberal -- *or* the kind of logical rigor he champions for students. This book was more sensationalistic than useful.

I highly recommend this well thought out and well researched book.

The only fault that I can find with it is that it completely misses the root of all these educational problems.

That root is the insidious efforts of American Marxists to weaken America in any way they can. Their motivation for this is that they hate America and everything it stands for, which is essentially a Free Enterprise economic system and a Liberal Democratic form of government. They also hate America because it is the rock upon which the great Socialist obscenities of the twentieth century (Naziism, Communism, Fascism) foundered. Finally, they hate America because, in the nineties, the example of its tremendous economic success finally discredited all forms of Socialism, even the relatively benign "third way."

The main strategy that these American Marxists have followed has been to infiltrate and take over as many American institutions as possible. This strategy was first developed by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. American Marxists have brilliantly succeeded in carrying out this strategy, and the corruption of American institutions, values, and culture by Marxist ideology is already far advanced.

One example is the total destruction of academic freedom in America. If you are an American educator, and you don't "tow the Marxist line," you will be subjected to endless harrassment, condemnation, and ostracism. In this, the American Marxists are merely following in the footsteps of their Communist, Nazi, and Fascist brethren.

The takeover of public education has been an especially important goal for these Marxists. Not only could they use their control of this institution to weaken America by continuously lowering the quality of its public education, but also they could use it as a platform for indoctrinating the young with their despicable ideology.

I hope that this fine book can act as at least one of the catalysts for initiating a political and social movement that has the purpose of wresting control of American public education, and indeed of a wide array of American institutions, away from these anti-American ideologues.

The author's analysis of the flaws of American's university system is news to most folks, and then some. Who would have thought that schools like Harvard would need a remedial writing center?

That, however, is the only good thing that came out of this book. The author twists the definition of "progressive," and makes progressives look like the reactionaries while poor, poor conservatives and traditionalists are the victims. He argued that the flaws in our nation's public school system stemmed from the actions of progressives, as if they never existed before progressives seemingly seized control. He provided figures indicating that education spending in the U.S. was higher than ever, without thinking why so many schools still hold their classes in broom closets or stairways. Is it the fault of progressives that military spending in this country has now outstripped educational spending? That the author doesn't attempt to answer.

The author said that he didn't abandon the progressive movement, but progressives abandoned him. That is doubtful. He should just admit that he was never that progressive in the first place - yearning for a time when a quality education was only available for a select minority, even in the public schools.

A final proof that the author was never progressive was his attack on the teaching of American History in schools today. Apparently, he despises the fact that more than ever, multiculturalism is being used in the teaching of AH. So dead white men are becoming forgotten. Unfortunately for him, with the population of the U.S. becoming more black, brown, and yellow than white, the teaching of only white historical figures isn't going to cut it anymore.