Dr. Lance Izumi, senior director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Education, recently wrote “The Great Classroom Collapse.” The book centers around a fundamental question: Why can’t kids today read or do math?
In an attempt to answer that question, “The Great Classroom Collapse” is divided into three sections:
- The equity agenda and the collapse of merit and rigor
- The collapse of reading skills
- The collapse of math skills
I called Dr. Izumi to ask him about his book, as well as the state of American education more broadly.
Neeraja Deshpande: The crisis of student behavior is constantly covered in the news, and it’s a huge reason why teachers leave. A lot of them say that they would like to manage behavior, but that they literally aren’t allowed to. What is the reason for this?
Lance Izumi: Sometimes the problem isn’t even the teacher. The teacher may want to manage the classroom, but the issue often lies with the administration in the district. The district may implement policies that force leniency in the classroom, which the teacher is then bound to follow.
One thing a high school student in Northern California told me was that when incidents occurred, the perpetrators were never held responsible for their actions. There were no consequences for their behaviors, which encourages similar behavior in the future. This is why the fire alarm was constantly being pulled; those kids knew there would be no repercussions and that they would not be held accountable.
This situation incentivized poor behavior. The adults, adhering to a social justice theory that discourages discipline because it might disproportionately affect certain minority or racial groups, are not doing any group of kids a favor. In fact, they are preventing real learning from occurring in the classroom for everyone, regardless of racial background.
Neeraja Deshpande: Why do you think student behavior across the nation has deteriorated these past few years?
Lance Izumi: Many people wonder why there is so much disruption in schools today. A lot of this actually stems from the fact that these kids are not learning, they’re frustrated. For example, in one of my chapters, I talk about an interview with a mom who is also a former teacher in Georgia. Her child had huge reading problems because he was being taught using a very ineffective reading instructional method. Because he was not able to read well, he struggled in other subjects as well. This led to behavioral issues—he started to act out due to frustration and anger.
However, after the mom pushed the school district, filing complaints and getting legal counsel, he was put into a situation where he received more effective reading instruction. As a result, he is now flourishing…which highlights that he wasn’t taught the fundamentals. Without that foundation, he was facing failure in school, leading to frustration and negative behaviors. I think this is true for many kids. When they don’t achieve success, they become frustrated, causing disruptions in the classroom.
One point I make in the book is about the bad apple theory: a disruptive child affects not only themselves but the entire classroom. Research shows that the performance of all the other kids declines when disruptive behavior is not corrected.
Neeraja Deshpande: Often, teachers are forced to use certain curricula that, frankly, are ineffective and lead to students not learning what they could have learned with better curricula. What’s the solution to this problem?
Lance Izumi: [Bad curricula have] put up blocks for kids. For example, I spoke to a math tutor in…the San Francisco Bay Area. He told me that he works with affluent kids who, when it comes time to multiply simple fractions, like one-half times three-fourths, don’t know that they can just get the answer—three-eighths—by multiplying the numerators and denominators.
Instead, they’re asked to color pictures and shade in different parts to eventually arrive at the answer of three-eighths. The tutor remarked that students would be given 20 problems to solve by coloring in pictures. He questioned how that method is efficient or helpful when they need to calculate something quickly.
This math tutor had previously been a high school teacher in that school district. He was told how to teach. Even though he knew it was ineffective, he felt obligated to follow the prescribed method. As a result, his students had poor performance—certainly not as high as it should have been. But it wasn’t his fault; it was the fault of those who insisted on using these ineffective curricula with students.
Neeraja Deshpande: What relationship does the teacher licensure system have with these curricula?
Lance Izumi: One of the things I cite in the book is that if you look at what is being taught in the schools of education at universities—specifically, these teacher credentialing programs—it turns out that in California, the vast majority of these schools received D and F grades from the National Council on Teacher Quality. This is because they fail to teach prospective teachers how to use phonics and other research-based reading methods.
So, if you’re coming through a system and earning your credentials from schools that are receiving such poor grades for not teaching effective methods, what good does it do to have a teaching credential? In fact, you might be worse off than if you knew nothing, because you’ll enter the classroom and teach kids a wrong and demonstrably ineffective method. This is what these schools of education promote—progressive teaching methods—that can actually hinder students’ ability to read.
Conversely, if you knew nothing at all, you might at least try your own experimentation to see what works. You’d likely be better off doing that than being convinced that a bad method is the right approach.