Have you heard of America's classroom situation compared to its industrial age setting? They’re not much different. And that’s a problem for many reasons. First, the world we live in—the world we are supposed to be preparing kids for—is significantly different from that world. Secondly, kids have to learn much, much more. And inside this model, it’s impossible to learn it all well. How can we expect students to thrive when we stash their minds with too much information…or the wrong information without the proper tools to process and store all of it? Paul Lott shares all kinds of information with listeners today on The State of Education about our outdated education model, bad facts in school, and how the government keeps poor kids… poor.
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– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
Have you heard of America's classroom situation compared to its industrial age setting? They’re not much different. And that’s a problem for many reasons. First, the world we live in—the world we are supposed to be preparing kids for—is significantly different from that world. Secondly, kids have to learn much, much more. And inside this model, it’s impossible to learn it all well. How can we expect students to thrive when we stash their minds with too much information…or the wrong information without the proper tools to process and store all of it? Paul Lott shares all kinds of information with listeners today on The State of Education about our outdated education model, bad facts in school, and how the government keeps poor kids… poor.
GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
ADAMS: Our guest today is Paul Lott. He is the founder of the National Society for the Advancement of Black Americans. The NSABA focuses on issues in black, urban poverty clusters: including issues like education and the potential impact of Critical Race Theory.
He is a veteran and the former president of the Harvard Black Alumni Society. [00:30] He is also an author of a bestselling book on Amazon, a husband, and the father of 10 children. So Paul, it’s great to have you with us today.
LOTT: Thank you, great to be here.
ADAMS: Alright. Well, we’re going to dig into some topics that I hope will be informative to those that listen in, and so let me jump right in with the first question. How important is education in this country and why is it so important?
LOTT: Well the founding fathers always thought [01:00] education is critical to enabling people to govern themselves. If you’re not literate and you can’t understand the issues and you can’t identify the issues, how can you reasonably elect people who are capable of leadership and addressing issues, etcetera, etcetera.
That’s why we have age limits on things; we expect there to be a certain amount of knowledge. So yeah, that’s really why it is critical to pretty much everything [01:30] that we do here.
ADAMS: So what excites you about education today and what opportunities do you believe that it provides to the average citizen?
LOTT: You know, I can’t say that there’s anything that really excites me about education today. I think that we have a lot of challenges that we need to face. And although there’s nothing that excites me, there’s lots of opportunities.
I’m frustrated in the education system [02:00] as it is today because it’s a throwback to the industrial age. It was really designed to train people to work in factories and I think that the system has been kind of outpaced by technology and advancement, etcetera, etcetera.
The opportunity that we have right now is to reimagine education based on science and what we’ve learned in terms of how people learn. [02:30] And I think that the biggest challenge that we have in education today is to find the proper role of technology in education.
ADAMS: Let’s talk for just a second about the whole idea you talked about; it’s kind of a throwback to the industrial time… A factory to make factory workers, if I may put it that way. And certainly, too often, we do see education that way. It’s kind of like we got this stamp and it’s just an assembly line.
You know, every kid that comes through, we just put that stamp on them and as long as the stamp fits … and when it doesn’t, we dumb it down a little bit [00:30] so that it fits a few more.
Maybe that’s an overstatement, but to some extent, it seems like that’s what’s happening sometimes. When we talk about people, you know, people are not cookie cutter...
LOTT: Right.
ADAMS: ...people are unique. Every individual is unique and dynamic in their own special way. And education needs to take a person where they [01:00] are and bring out the best in them, empower them to be their very best and tap into their full potential. To discover what their gifts and abilities are and then resource that in a sense. So let’s talk about that uniqueness.
LOTT:T Well, okay, so, when I say that today’s system is designed for something in the past, it doesn’t allow [01:30] for personalization in education, but the bigger burden is … the education system was designed with an objective and a goal.
It didn’t want to create a critical thinker, it didn’t want to take on the responsibility of being a tool of personal fulfillment—it’s goal was to enable the average citizen to have a minimal level of literacy to function [02:00] in the society of that time. Okay?
ADAMS: Okay.
LOTT: I think that the problem that we have is we’ve taken the same structure, okay? We call it a waterfall, right? Lesson, lesson, lesson, quiz; lesson, lesson, quiz; test… you know. Start over again, average out the scores and keep moving.
Today, we have too much information that our children have to learn [02:30] to follow that same model. In those days, you had a small body of knowledge that you had to transform. So you had time for repetition, a discussion about it, and kind of recycling and going through it so that—it wasn’t a lot—but you could learn it well, right?
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Today, we have a lot more that we’re trying to have them learn, and we’re adding things that have nothing to do with literacy or education. It’s a lot of social things being [03:00] thrown in.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: So that system can’t work; see what I’m saying?
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: That system can’t work because we’re asking the system to do a lot more. One of the things that I’ve always decried, is that in the past we had the idea that a person could go to college … that the purpose of primary education was basic literature, right?
And then when you went on to middle school and highschool, gradually in each phase, [03:30] a little more was added to it. In middle school you would get a little bit more into more sophisticated math and sciences. In highschool, you could break out and continue onto further mastery.
And the idea there was you could go into a trade—so there was a vocational-technical school—you could look at a business track, you could look at a college track, or you could just do general studies and then just figure out where you wanted to go.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Now, we have this idea that everybody has to be college ready, not life ready; everybody needs [04:00] to be college ready. And then somebody, somewhere said, “You know what? Those really smart guys at those liberal arts schools, they do these critical thinking exercises; they do all this wonderful stuff. How about if we have highschoolers do that?”
Then somebody said, “Oh, those highschoolers, it’s not really working out because we haven’t pushed it low enough.” And so they keep taking this advanced criteria and they try to push it further and further and further down.
And they’re ignoring human nature. [04:30] Human nature says, not everybody is going to be a critical thinker. Not everybody is going to desire to go to a liberal arts college and think about the great things of the universe.
And so, the system can’t work because it doesn’t have a clear objective. And we never answer that question: what’s the objective? What is the purpose of it? If we say A) we need to have a basic level of literacy, that a person can function in a democracy and make informed, educated decisions [05:00] about the direction of the country and the people that they elect. Right? You start there.
And that’s why education is compulsory. Then you have to say B) we need them to be competitive enough to be able to build the economy of the United States—I know I talk a lot but…
ADAMS: No, that’s great! Yeah, that’s absolutely right.
LOTT: So then we look at that. We have to identify those objectives. Our objective in education cannot be to just become more educated. [05:30] And that’s where we are. And that’s where we’re running into problems. We’re educating to become more educated.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: And those objectives are not clear.
ADAMS: Yeah, it’s kind of like a system that’s selling up and so we’re always trying to get more buy-in, whether it’s always really beneficial to the individual or the society or not.
ADAMS: Let’s switch directions just a little bit. I mean, we hear a lot of talk about failing schools today. It’s in the news… It’s not just a new thing. For the last couple of decades, that’s just kind of out there.
Many people, at least in my circles—I think it’s kind of generally speaking—many people think this phenomenon is mostly an urban [00:30] thing. I think it’s the way the media and whoever promotes that. But the reality is, it’s not. Failing schools are found in urban areas, in suburban areas, in rural communities; so what is a failing school and what are some leading causes for it?
LOTT: I don’t think there is such a thing as a failing school. I think there’s such a thing as a failing community. Schools [01:00] are a reflection of community cohesion. Community cohesion is a reflection of family stability. Okay?
I have never seen a successful school… If I go to Luton County, I’m not going to find low-income high-crime…. I’m not going to find any of those high unemployment [01:30] … I’m not going to find any of that.
I’m going to find families, by and large, that own their homes… it’s a mother and father—married—working, taking care of their children, interacting with their neighbors: engaging in their community. So usually, schools are an outgrowth of the community and the family.
There’s a culture that goes along with education. I’ll tell you a story. [02:00] My mom is from the south, grew up on a sharecropper’s farm, came north in the Great Migration… Now, my freshman year of college, I came back from Harvard and I was like, “Oh my professors are so smart.” My Mother just said, “Hm!”
And I said, “Well, what’s that about?” And she goes, “They’re not very smart.” I said, “Why do you say that?” She goes, “Well, they take a bunch of really smart kids and they put them in a room, then they give them some work and they take credit for it.” [02:30]
She goes, “You could have thrown a book in there; they could have fought over the book, read the book, and done the work without the presence of the professor.” She’s like, “It’s a lot harder to teach the kids that don’t want to be there than it is to teach the kids who do want to be there.”
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: And we forget that, right?
ADAMS: Yeah, that’s true.
LOTT: Kids don’t get the education you want them to have. Kids get the education they take. And so, if you want a successful school, you have to deal with the cultural aspect of the child [03:00] wanting the education, and usually that comes from a family culture where it’s important—and they may be doing it to please a parent, or because they see the path their parents have been on, they see the long road ahead of them…
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: ...why they need it, they understand the context of it and they perform. I’ve worked in a lot of school districts in a lot of places around the country and have had lots of conversations with the kids, and I can tell you [03:30] that a child doesn’t do poorly in school because they don’t care about school: they don’t care about school because at some point in time they started to do poorly and fall behind.
To protect their own self-identity, they reject the idea that they need to be good at school. And once that culture has set in, that’s a very difficult thing to fight. And mostly, that’s a cultural change [04:00] that you have to make in the community to lift them up.
Now, that being said, there are artificial ways to do it, right? When we look at a private school that’s doing well and we say, “See? The private school does it better.” Not necessarily.
The private school is a self-selecting community. Parents who are engaged take the time and resources to move their child there, and so you’re literally selecting parents and creating a micro-education [04:30] community, right? But the key is always with the parents and the family, right?
ADAMS: That’s true. There’s a lot of truth in that.
LOTT: Yes, it’s always there. And I think that’s why our schools are starting to fail. I think A) We’ve relied too much and put too much faith in the government overlords of schools. And we allow them to just do things that aren’t evidence-based.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Right?
ADAMS: Yeah, absolutely. [05:00]
LOTT: You know, they don’t look at the science. For example, some schools are saying oh, we’re going to get rid of homework because it doesn’t do any good. Right?
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: But the problem is, unless you practice and have repetition, you don’t learn anything. We all know this! At your job? We know this, this is human behavior. It’s necessary for education, but somebody decided, because they don’t understand why the kid doesn’t want to do the work, [05:30] they came up with an explanation so they don’t have to ask the kid to do the work or follow up to do the work.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: And that’s a problem with government schools. They don’t have to be evidence-based to be funded. Right? There’s no consequence to making mistakes.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: And it’s going to take a very long time to correct those mistakes.
ADAMS: So, there again, tht reflects back on what is the environment at home? [06:00]
LOTT: Yep.
ADAMS: If you’ve got a strong environment at home, you know, they’re going to see that that homework is done. So, the child performs based on what’s going on at home. And if you don’t have a strong environment at home, the child is not probably going to have the initiative just to do it.
They go home, they’ve got other distractions and whatnot. And if there are no real consequences for them not doing their work…but that really goes back into a deeper situation where the system itself [06:30] has degenerated into a situation where there really is no real accountability all the way up through.
And so the way you solve problems is you take away requirements. So, for example, our governor just made the decision that we were going to scale back on higher math learning.
LOTT: Yep.
ADAMS: As if that’s going to be a solution. I mean, that is not a solution, [07:00] that is devastating to all of these people that are so needed in the workforce, and if we don’t learn higher math skills, we will never compete with the world. It’s just the harsh realities, but the solution is always, well, it’s not working out so we’ll let it go, instead of finding out a better way to engage at a deeper level—as you were talking about—in our communities…
Engage at a deeper level and find ways to innovatively [07:30] motivate. Bottom line is, everything comes down to motivation. There’s incentive, there’s reward, there’s what’s the ideal put into the child’s mind?
As you mentioned, a lot of times that comes from their community, from their family, and where that’s lacking it’s really difficult to shape that in a classroom when a child can’t see it at home [08:00] or really even imagine it because they have no experience in that.
ADAMS: So that leads to a next question. We often hear, “Okay, we gotta throw more money at a failing school because the problem is lack of resources.” Talk to me about that.
LOTT: I’ll start with a quick story. I used to work in a non-profit that did sustainability projects...after African countries have come through created civil war. [00:30] There was civil war in Liberia for 15 years or whatever, and the problem they were having was that they had sent over teachers and administrators from America to try to re-setup the education system there and they were having no luck.
And the reason for that was a lot of the assumptions that the Americans were making. You might have 25 kids who show up to a class, and then once the word spread throughout the bush, as they call it, you might have a hundred kids the next day.
But these were kids that would travel for miles [01:00] to come to school. They were enthusiastic about coming to school. It was a matter of trying to figure out how to deal with capacity, etcetera, etcetera.
Now, these schools made good progress on about $100.00 a month. If you look at the education system we have now … Most students at Harvard are on Financial Aid. So for a single year at Harvard, it is actually cheaper than for a single year [01:30] for a student in the DC school system.
So money has nothing to do with it. They figured out after the Obama Administration—because they threw all kinds of grants and money and funds at things and it did not do any better—you can’t take a teacher that has a bunch of kids sitting in a classroom, throw money at them, and expect that the class is going to get better because the teacher makes more money. That doesn’t even make sense.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Once the building and facilities—those types of things … I mean, this country got to where it was without education, [02:00] comfort, convenience, etcetera, etcetera… So there was a lot of consolidation, that was a trend all over the country: in black areas, in white areas. But, you know, poor areas where population was decreasing… all that money—billions of dollars—was put into it.
And yet, the graduation rates, the proficiency rates went largely unchanged. It was remarkably, consistently, underperforming. So, I’m not saying money can’t make a difference, [02:30] but it goes back to we haven't defined the end-game, the objective of our education. Therefore, adding money to something where we don’t have a clear objective, can’t result in a solution. Right?
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: So, there are some very core, systemic issues in our education system that we will always go backwards [03:00] until we address them. The first issue is this: every industrialized country in the world has a 12-month school calendar. America has the shortest school-calendar of any industrialized country, okay?
When we look at our education standards, Common Core, Virginia SOL—all of these standards are loosely derived from the international standard. The international standard is for 12 months. [03:30] We take these standards so that we can be competitive and comparative, and we put them in our system for 9 months, and then we wonder why we fall behind.
Well they have three more months to study this stuff, okay? When it comes to drop-out rates: drop-out rates are lowest in the countries with year-round school. Right? Because poor communities don’t typically go on vacation [04:00] during those three months, the kids don’t need to be on the farm (which is why we have it in the first place)...
ADAMS: Right.
LOTT: ...we don’t need any of that. What it results in the inner city is that’s the highest gang-recruiting time.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Right? If you would lengthen the 12-month calendar, we would have more time to get the work… now if you want to spend more money on that? That’s a good idea. Right?
You’d have three more months [04:30] of learning, roughly 10 or 11 additional weeks of learning, it would match up to the international calendar, it would match up to the timeline of the international standards in terms of what needs to be put into the class, and it would take kids off the street, and [give] less of an opportunity to get involved with things like crime.
And then finally, most kids, they forget a lot during the summer and the first part of the next year is spent talking a lot about the last part of last year, right? That would go away [05:00] because you would have continuous learning and reinforcement.
ADMAS: Yeah. Interesting thoughts there, and certainly a lot of conversation around that, and I think there’s evidence-based concepts there that would prove that it’s not a bad idea.
I think that it’s hard to change things we’ve always done and then people like to have their vacation times [05:30] and so forth. We get that. There again, it’s how do we find solutions that actually make everything better?
LOTT: The problem that’s happened both in poor white communities and poor black communities, is those communities were normally formed during the industrial age, right? When you have manufacturing and industry, you don’t need as much of an education to enter the middle class, okay?
So during the Great Migration, blacks moved North and West, and every single area where we see poverty clusters, it’s as a result of [00:30] blacks moving from the South to the North and West for jobs. 90% of the blacks entered the South after the Civil War, 47% were in the North by 1968, okay?
When we look at poor white communities, they usually are clustered around failed industry: coal, steel, etcetera.
ADAMS: Right.
LOTT: Okay? So, it was never the case that the education went wrong. The issue was that the education never existed. The average education [01:00] of a black person migrating North was 6.9 years of school. Right? This happened during segregation, and so what you ended up with—you had a lot of blacks moving North, they were clustered into tight communities, and they were uneducated.
So between all the great wars, there was no immigration because the American Government didn’t want soldiers to have to come back to foreign people for jobs. Get a million angry soldiers, [01:30] that could be a problem.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: So what they did was shut down immigration, and that cause triggered another problem after World War 2. About 5 million blacks moved North and West for jobs because the soldiers came home, the women went home, right? And there was no immigration to fill the labor gap.
Northern companies were recruiting to the South to grab people and bring them North. Okay? So you ended up [02:00] with these clusters and then the borders opened up, manufacturing started to move overseas, and you were left with uneducated populations when the jobs moved away.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: Now normally what happens when the jobs go away is the people migrate someplace else. But we also implemented generous social programs. So you paid people to stay in places where there were no jobs. We created these.
So you have a situation where [02:30] the jobs have left, and then the government introduced generous programs, and we literally paid people to stay in areas where there’s no hope of those jobs returning.
And that’s the same in Appalachia. I talked to a woman from West Virginia: her family still lives there, the coal mines have collapsed, most of the community lives off of government assistance.
Whereas if we went back 100 years ago—there’s a reason why we have a thing called ghost towns…
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: ...when the economies collapsed, [03:00] people got up and moved to areas to where there were jobs. The way our government system works, we don’t do that anymore. So we create these permanent poverty enclaves of the least educated Americans who need manufacturing and skilled labor jobs. They’re never going to go to college; it’s not going to happen.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: And [they] don’t want to. So we’re creating these problems. We’re maintaining these problems. This would not have happened without that. [03:30] So because these areas have historical reasons [of] how they got there, right? We look at undereducation… if we look at either racial segregation… and segregation worked both ways.
ADAMS: Right.
LOTT: There’s a reason why this concentration of white people in the Appalachia—there was a level of segregation there. Self-segregation. So it was like segregation, but it was an all-white community [04:00] focused on coal mining.
But if you look at Baltimore—that was done during segregation but the net result is the same. And the key thing is that it’s not systemic racism.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: We took the racism out of the system in the 1960s, okay? We did that in the 1960s. And I have some quick numbers, if I could, that’ll prove that racism has nothing to do with it. [04:30] So let’s look at the black poverty rate in 1959.
The black poverty rate in 1959 was 55%. The white poverty rate was 18.1 %.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: In 1968, the Free Housing Act was passed, black poverty went from 55% to 34.7%, white poverty went to 10% in 1968. Here’s a shocker. In 2018, [05:00] black poverty was 20.7%. So if we look at that, it goes from 55% and over the course of 50 years it falls to less than half.
ADAMS: Yeah.
LOTT: White poverty, in 2018, was at 11.8%. So after 50 years, the middle part of that white poverty leveled off being about 10%, and in 2018 went up. So if we looked at it on a chart, [05:30] we see white poverty looks like this… and black and every other racial group is high poverty and every other group is getting better.
If a system was systematically stacked against minorities and people of color, you wouldn’t see that. Right? You can’t say that America was built to benefit white people because white people aren’t increasing in benefit, [06:00] they’re leveling off.
And it kinda makes sense. If you look at 10% the lowest, 10% the highest it’s a natural kind of a bell curve. Well the American system is improving life for everyone, just at a different pace. Blacks and minorities started at a lower point, it’s taking time to level off but we went from 55% poverty 20% poverty.
And that’s twice the poverty rate of white Americans [06:30] but that wasn’t the case 50 years ago. This is US Census Data, this is not my data. You can go to the website, you can download the spreadsheets and you will see that there is no systemic racism.