Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire

James Cagney never said “You dirty rat” in any of his films. Abraham Lincoln had a reedy voice, not the elegant baritone of Sam Waterston, and the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than we do.

These misconceptions are difficult to shake because they sit so comfortably in the mind. There is another, more disturbing, misconception lurking in the minds of most Americans: the bien-pensant assumption that inner city schools are such disasters because the feds starve them of money, shunting cash instead to leafy suburban schools.

Jonathan Kozol’s book, Savage Inequalities, embedded in the national imagination the image of poor kids sharing textbooks whilst crammed into schools “with peeling paint.” The paint, which one hears cited again and again, seems to have made an especially deep impression. The lesson is that a lack of funds prevents students from learning.

However, Kozol’s enthusiasts are remarkably loathe to study cases in which his advice has actually been taken. Such cases teach quite a different lesson.

Exhibit A is New Jersey from 1998 to the present. In ‘98, funding discrepancies between gritty urban schools and cushy suburban schools were eliminated by legislative fiat. And the result has been essentially nothing. The urban schools were hopelessly unable to comply, for example, with the No Child Left Behind requirements after 2000. Money didn’t make the teachers and administrators any better at their jobs. Partly, this was because so many of them have been conditioned to resist doing their jobs effectively.

However, the secret to teaching poor children—often from book-shy, single-parent homes—how to read has been out for over 40 years. In the 1960s, the federally funded education program, Project Follow Through, proved that the best strategy for teaching reading was rigorous, phonics-based instruction, termed Direct Instruction.

Since then it has been repeatedly demonstrated that despite peeling paint and computer shortages, this type of instruction teaches kids to read. Period. Yet despite those findings, such programs have fought a losing battle with more “holistic” whole-language methods that teach students to read word by word. These methods, trendy though they are, have failed to produce a generation of proficient readers. Whence comes this curious notion that anything is better than a technique that works?

The even larger problem in American public schooling is the system-wide devotion to inculcating leftist dogma rather than imparting skills. An especially cherished text is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a peculiar piece of Marxist rhetoric that exhorts teachers to become learners and students to become teachers. Small wonder disorder reigns in today’s public schools.

And never mind the legions of people who have succeeded in teaching poor kids on small budgets. Rafe Esquith, author of Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, is performing miracles in Central Los Angeles. His book offers solid, proven teaching advice, which is predictably ignored by our educational elites. Instead, all but a handful of our nation’s prospective teachers will be assigned to read the 8 millionth printing of Savage Inequalities.

Kozol’s book retains its hold because it plays into a cherished ideological conviction: the lower classes are neglected by cigar-chomping power mongers on high. There is now, however, such an accumulation of evidence demonstrating money is not the central problem of inner-city schools that the Kozolian schema’s continued supremacy defies comprehension.

Pre-Copernican astronomers in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. As historian Daniel Boorstin chronicled, “The scheme’s simplicity, symmetry, and common sense seemed to confirm countless axioms of philosophy, theology, and religion.” But it was wrong. Many stars’ movements made no sense when we assumed that the Earth was at the middle of things—but astronomers swept discrepancies under the rug and called those stars “eccentrics.”

Apparently we are to consider the Rafe Esquiths and those working wonders with Direct Instruction as “eccentrics” as well. But the benefits of clinging to the us vs. them education paradigm—such as the feelings of moral superiority and self-righteous compassion we enjoy—are not worth the damage inflicted on those actually in need.

If the New Jersey experiment is treated as a mere “eccentric,” it means other school districts will repeat the mistake. If. Kozol is elevated in perpetuo, earnest young people pursuing educational careers will continue to ply their trade attached to the erroneous idea that the problem of American education is simply state politicians holding out on the poor.

And meanwhile, Mr. Esquith’s book will go out of print in a year or three while across America people listen to the audio book of Savage Inequalities in their cars.

John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. An earlier version of this article appeared in The New York Sun on February 22, 2007