If more money was diverted to school choice efforts, our education system would necessarily be upended

Columnist Star Parker wrote recently on this issue and the urgency of school reform amidst horrible proficiency statistics.

As Parker notes, America’s financial contribution to education is second to none. Yet none of that additional investment is evident in overall grades. Students here rank 23, 25 and 40 globally when it comes to reading, science and math, respectively. Moreover, she writes, “In the case of our black children, the results are dismal. In the 2015 NAEP math scores, 17 percent of black fourth-graders and 11 percent of black eighth-graders performed at ‘proficient’ levels. In reading, 16 percent of black fourth-graders and 15 percent of black eighth-graders were ‘proficient.’” Minority-filled schools often take the brunt of the effect of our current education system whose structure creates poor results.

However, according to the Cato Institute, “Our education system’s troubles are not confined to low-income districts — America’s students as a whole lag behind many other industrialized nations on international tests. Government expenditures on K-12 education have more than doubled over the last 40 years (adjusted for inflation), and yet U.S. students’ academic performance at the end of high school is flat. Top-down regulations intended to improve quality instead stifle diversity and innovation. And rather than foster harmony, too often government schools force citizens into social conflict.”

This is a despicable return on investment. Making matters worse, the people who justify the status quo are demonizing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for what Parker describes is her “brutally honest assessment about the state of education in our country.” At least the Heartland, where school choice is proliferating, is on DeVos’ side. Parkes adds, “Today, there are 63 different school choice programs across the nation involving 469,000 individuals, according to EdChoice. But total expenditures on school choice programs are still less the 0.4 percent of the $586.8 billion we spend annually on K-12 education.”

If more of that money can be diverted to school choice efforts — where the results speak for themselves — the return on investment would be so remarkable that education in America as we know it would be completely upended. No wonder elitists are fighting so hard to maintain a system that breeds dependency.

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What's the Purpose of Higher Education?

College is About More Than Simply Getting a Job

I recently spoke with a college-bound student and his mother in my career services office. These types of meetings have significantly increased in the last few years as families want to inquire about all the statistical data related to job placement. I asked the young man what his ideal college experience looked like. His answer: “I want to roll through my classes, get the parchment, then get a really good, high-paying job.”

Is that all a college education is? A piece of paper that gets you a job? My fear has been that this is what the college experience has come to for current education “consumers.” It seems my fears have been confirmed. According to Jeff Selingo, one of the nation’s leading higher education strategists, New York Times best-selling author, and Washington Post columnist, “Prospective students and parents now study the financial benefits of higher education and career outcomes of graduates of campuses they’re considering as thoroughly as they scrutinize a college’s academic offerings, social life, and location.”

Selingo has captured the mindset that most college seekers and families bring to the college search. Families are shopping around to buy an education as a “transaction” to purchase a job. This view is affirmed by Hunter Rowlings, a former president of the Association of American Universities. He states that “most everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house.” He goes on to say:

A college education is no car. The courses the student decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his focus and determination — all contribute far more to her educational “outcome” than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. Most public discussion of higher education today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.

Both Salingo and Rowlings prompt us to ask the extremely important question: What is a college education? Having invested my life in college students and having talked with thousands of parents and high school seniors over nearly a quarter-century, I have indeed pondered the purpose of education. Many individuals I have interacted with have articulated this misinformed and shallow definition of education and the pursuit of happiness. They say that success is found by going to college, buying a degree, satisfying the basic requirements, securing a well-paying job, going to work, getting a paycheck, and acquiring material possessions.

I have led a nationally ranked career services office, motivating students to find their calling and either secure a meaningful career or go off to professional or graduate school. You might think I would enthusiastically endorse this job-focused philosophy. I don’t. A college education should not be viewed as a product to buy that delivers self-centered opportunities. This is an inward-focused, narcissistic, and limited view of education.

Yes, the cost to attend college, the placement rate, the return on investment numbers, the on-campus recruiting stats, the acceptance rate to graduate school, and the average debt load of the alumni are all important figures to consider (all have their place in the equation/discussion/evaluative process). But these numbers provide a very superficial appraisal of the true hope, heart, and intrinsic “value” of education. Legitimate education assists students in their sincere pursuit of instruction, character development, competence, and virtues to deliberately and accountably engage all of life. Think about it: Where will students prepare for being an ethical employee, a faithful husband or wife, a loving father or mother, an involved neighbor or community member, a devoted friend, etc?

I proposed a follow-up question to the young man sitting in my office, asking him if there were other things he wanted to experience, be involved in, or develop. His answer was direct and firm. “No, not that I can think of.” With this response, a number of thoughts quickly ran through my mind. What about the development of his moral compass and the building of lifelong friendships? Or his character development and leadership opportunities? What has happened to becoming a lifelong learner? To grappling with the significant questions of life? Learning how to live in community, respecting people much different than himself, seeking out opportunities to serve, and landing on a set of values that will direct his life — where do these come in?

The narrowly focused, data-driven view of the college experience espoused by this young man is consistent with the current research, but is it valid? No. Grove City College professors Gary Smith and Paul Kemeny note: “The goal of education is to help students to think deeply about the major ethical, historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological issues of our day. This will effectively equip them to work in crucial culture-shaping institutions, such as business, education, the media, government, and the church, in order to serve the common good.”

College graduates should not be viewed as round pegs to go into round holes but as individuals who have the hearts, souls, minds, and skills to make a difference in the lives of others and the world. Students should be wholly educated to prepare them to serve their Maker and their neighbor in their particular vocation and in all of life. This preparation, this transformation, does not happen by the vending-machine approach to higher education. As I often say to parents and prospective students, a career or grad school “fit” is an appropriate expectation of a personal and financial investment in an education. But personal growth, learning, and maturity are much more profoundly important than “the job.” This is education, and it is worth the investment!

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Why We Must Save Intellectual Freedom

It is imperative that we restore intellectual freedom in higher education in order to preserve freedom for society itself.

It’s no secret that the modern college campus has become a place hostile to intellectual freedom. Trigger warnings, thought control and speech laws have transformed what used to be places of learning into microcosms of ideological conformity. Students across the country have learned to conceal their thoughts, opinions and even questions in exchange for a passing grade. Acceptance by the group-think ruling elites supersedes the pursuit of knowledge, learning and truth.

The “right” to not be offended has replaced the right to have an opinion differing from accepted academic dogma. Ironically, in a country founded upon freedom of speech and the value of the individual, many American universities function as independent totalitarian regimes with full rights to punish intellectual dissidents with lower grades. It is as if the American university has morphed into East Berlin, while the rest of the country lives in the freedom of West Berlin.

Restoring intellectual freedom to the university means examining the fault lines and courageously confronting them. In his book, The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood states, “Academic freedom is a combination of freedom from indoctrination and freedom to engage in disciplined inquiry, which includes the freedom to read, hear, and consider views that differ from those of their instructors.”

Academic freedom therefore consists of two things. 1) Freedom from indoctrination and 2) Freedom to consider other views. First, freedom from indoctrination means that professors should teach facts, not opinions. They should fairly represent all views. They should grade on basis of the quality of the student’s work, rather their own opinions. Professors should not take advantage of the youth and naïveté of students in order to further their political aspirations to indoctrinate others.

Furthermore, students should have the freedom to consider other views and question presuppositions. Wood describes this freedom as, “The freedom to ask questions; the freedom to challenge assumptions and doctrines; the freedom to criticize; the freedom to speculate; the freedom to re-examine old evidence and to search for new evidence; the freedom to express what one has found; the freedom to hear others who seek to express what they have found; the freedom to engage in dialogue with informed peers; the freedom to read and consider the views of people who lived before one’s own time; the freedom to teach what one has, by diligent effort learned; and even the freedom to refrain from speaking.”

This type of freedom has traditionally made the university experience a unique time of life in which students take the time to reflect and ask questions. If academic leaders bar certain questions or conclusions, it compromises the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking. It only encourages students to memorize and parrot facts, in order to stay safe and pass the class. In contrast, Wood notes, “Intellectual freedom is the freedom of an individual to make up his own mind.”

Students also have a right to a third freedom: the freedom to learn without interruptions, disruptive protests, yelling, or having a student dominate the class discussion. Students must have the freedom to pursue their education and learning experience. When a university gives “freedom” to disruptive students on the basis of freedom of speech, they actually deny the freedom of the other students to learn. Disruptive students perceive freedom as being the “right” to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they please. Yet this is not freedom, but rather, license. True freedom does not exist without responsibility. It is responsibility to oneself and responsibility to others. It was known in prior days as “civility.”

Wood observes that the implementation of intellectual freedom ultimately depends upon the collective willingness of students, faculty and administrations to abide by the rules of civility. Such civility and mutual respect allows students the freedom to question, criticize, test new evidence and ultimately to learn.

Without an honest pursuit of intellectual freedom, we fail to shape students into responsible citizens capable of understanding and stewarding a free society. Transposing the totalitarian nature of some universities that bar speakers and arbitrarily label dissident opinions as “hateful,” “insensitive,” “bigoted” or “racist,” onto the rest of society, we see the inevitable thought-control bleeding into our culture. Yet, who decides the acceptable from the unacceptable speech? The loudest voice. The strongest voice. The most coercive voice. And this voice rarely reflects the voice of the people. It is therefore imperative that we restore intellectual freedom in higher education in order to preserve freedom for society itself.

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