FOOD FOR THOUGHT 1:

WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE THE NEW YORK TIMES (AND THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE , AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND THE PORTLAND OREGONIAN) SHOWED NO INTEREST IN THIS OP ED PIECE ?

..........Back in early March of this year, 2006, I submitted the following op ed piece (though it's shorter and trimmer now) to the Times and never heard a peep. Now, I know perfectly well that that's the policy—if you don't hear within a week, they don't want the piece. Fair enough. But why do you suppose they weren't interested? Or why do you suppose The Chicago Tribune wasn't interested, or The Wall Street Journal, either?

..........To me, it becomes a more and more interesting question. For the sake of argument, let's assume that, at each paper, the piece really did get looked at and wasn't simply orphaned and lost among the thousands of submissions that must flood into the the editors' offices all the time. Let's assume, in other words, that an editorial op ed staff member in each case picked it up, read it, and made a reasoned decision not to run it.

..........What's interesting is: why not run it?

..........Here's a kind of brain-exercise. Imagine that you yourself were that editor at the Times or Tribune or Journal or Oregonian. What did you think about it? Did you hate the piece? Or did you like it, even love it, wish you could run it, but feel that you couldn't—and, of course, if you felt you "couldn't," then why not?

..........Was there something unsound about it? Something lacking? Something untrue? Or, well—was there something embarrassing about it? What was the reason?

.......... If these questions interest you as they do me, and if you email me your "reasons" for rejecting the piece, and if those reasons are interesting or on the mark in some interesting and germane way, maybe I could post some of them here for our general observation and, maybe, discussion.

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..........By the way, I first wrote and submitted the piece in response to a Times editorial (February 26, 2006) under the title "Proof of Learning at College." The question, raised by a current news item, was whether or not students really learn anything in college and, in order to find out, whether or not systems should be set up and installed for purposes of such measurement. The Times editorial concluded this way:

..............................Colleges and universities should join
....................in the hunt for acceptable ways to measure
....................student progress, rather than simply fighting
....................the whole idea from the sidelines. Unless the higher
....................education community wakes up to this problem—
....................and resolves to do a better job—the movement aimed
....................at regulating colleges and forcing them to demon-
....................strate that students are actually learning will only keep
....................growing.

The more recent submissions, as you can see, refer not to that earlier question but to another one, hardly any different, raised by the commission report that's mentioned in the first line.

..........Here's my piece:

...

COLLEGE IS TOO LATE

..........In a report released earlier this month [meaning August 2006], the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, chaired by Charles Miller, announced that "Too many Americans just aren't getting the education that they need" and that "many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates."

..........Concurrently, Margaret Spellings, the Bush administration's Education Secretary, was cited as holding the opinion that "The commission has made bold recommendations on improving the accessibility and affordability of higher education," recommendations that she intended to give "very serious consideration."

..........Well, I can speak to the validity of the Commission's findings. But I can also speak to the fallacy that any sort of cure will come through "improving the accessibility and affordability of higher education."

..........I retired last February after 35 years as an English professor in a large public urban university, and it's no secret to anyone that over that span I was able to help only very, very few students in any significant way improve their essential skills in reading, writing, or reasoning. When I first began, in 1971, I saw quickly that any significant basic influence I was going to have on my students would be extremely slight. And I saw this truth confirmed and reconfirmed semester after semester until the 2005 rolled around.

..........The real truth, which any honest, independent, and well informed commission on "the future of higher education" would announce, is this: That unless students are educated in the basics before they leave high school, college is guaranteed, for all but the tiniest few, to be a great and expensive waste of effort

..........Basic preparation has got to occur before college, not in it

..........Over my career, I typically taught two sections of composition a semester and two of a literature survey, until, later, my load was reduced from eight courses a year to seven. Then for the last decade or so, I taught only literature, no composition.

..........Multiplying the number of courses I taught by the average number of students in each, I find that I instructed approximately 9,873 students. I'll round up to 10,000.

..........Most of these students were considerate, polite, likeable, some even hard-working-yet they remained unreachable at the intellectual or educational levels that really mattered. Without practicing the purest deception, I can do nothing else than place at a discomfiting 2%, conceivably 3%, the proportion of students who left any of my courses at a higher level of ability or achievement than they'd entered at. They may have read a book or two that they wouldn't otherwise have read, but their intellectual essence was unchanged, and certainly their basic skills were unchanged. This meant that, for 9,800 of my 10,000 students, entering a course at F meant leaving at F; entering at C, leaving at C; B, B, and so on.

..........Well-intended as they were, my students remained essentially unreachable for the simple reason that by eighth grade, ninth at the latest, they hadn't internalized the skills and concepts that could reveal to them things like structure and correctness in language, or that could make them at home with the basic elements of logic, comparison, analysis-the very motors and gears of thinking.

..........By freshman year in college, at age 17 or 18, it was much too late.

..........Helping two hundred out of 10,000 students gives me a job performance rating of 2%, not a number to please administrators, deans, or commissions on higher education. But I know with absolute certainty that nothing will change in academic stories like mine-or the nation's-until we make certain sure that the bedrock of education occurs at the only place it can: And that's early, in primary and middle school, at the brick-and-mortar foundations of lives.

............................................................—Eric Larsen is author of the recent book A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers).
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