“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” That expression is a lie when it comes to education in the United States. Research on 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members ranks nations on their overall performance in various educational measures. The United States is ranked 17th for the best education, 12th in salaries paid to teachers, 14th in giving the greatest respect to teachers, 22nd in reading, 28th in science, the very last in mathematics and first in overall spending in the world. In a nutshell, it all comes down to the quality of education – or lack of it – that our schools provide.

Perhaps there are visible signs and symptoms for the skeptical.

The annual National Spelling Bee is the most coveted spelling competition and attracts 300 elite minds from all over the nation. Since 1999, of the 16 competitions, 11 have been won by children of Indian origin. It is not uncommon to see seven or eight children of Indian origin among the top 10 contestants. It is a bittersweet moment in the life of the American education system, a true representation of a statistically improbable but a growing phenomenon. The mathematical probability of such a rare event is only 0.00002.

These children are offspring of engineers and doctors, the best students and professionals who migrated from India in the 1990s, a phenomenon famously known as brain drain. Recent immigrants find noticeable differences in the quality of education their children get in the United States compared with the rigor they faced growing up in India. It is common among immigrant families to push their children harder toward excellence in order to simulate conditions in their home countries. The spelling bee prodigies are the result of after-school extra-curricular academic activities and high expectations from parents. These children spend half of their day at schools that do not challenge them as much as their parents do. It is easy to predict that the children of third- or fourth-generation professionals from India will not be strong enough to win the spelling bee in the future, primarily due to lowered expectations and an unchallenging atmosphere in American schools.

This moment of glory dominated by children from Asia is expected to be short-lived, primarily for two reasons: There is a continuous decline in the influx of top professionals and students from Asia and particularly from India, and the future generations will be educated in the American school system. The law of diminishing returns will predictably produce an academically weaker generation of children of Asian origin. The worrisome state of our education system only begins with this curious incidence. Despite the fact that the best universities in the world still exist and flourish in this country, sadly the best K-12 schools do not. The issues surrounding the slow death of our education system are multi-fold and intertwined. Perhaps a virtual description of a classroom full of first-graders in a typical suburban public school system might shed some light.

THE EARLY YEARS

Primary schools mainly teach numerals and reading to young children. The system has mastered the delivery of basic concepts by using interesting games, quizzes, apps, smart boards and digital media in classrooms. As a result, we are relatively healthy in early education compared with the rest of the world. Regrettably, the overload of innovation in early education results in a fatigue in delivery of quality material at the higher levels. Moreover, parents of middle and high school students criticize schools in a chorus for various reasons. A common complaint is the repetition of concepts for prolonged periods before introducing newer ideas. As a result, children develop a dislike for school. Research in early literacy indicates that children of such parents have a lesser likelihood for success in higher education. In all likelihood, the true learning and knowledge will elude them. Researchers have proposed theories that are worth exploring.

THE ASIAN SYSTEM

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers,” argues that younger Asian students gain an advantage in math over their Western counterparts by the time they turn 5 years old. He reasons out this early gap as a result of the simplicity of Asian languages. In Cantonese, for instance, 4 is read as “si” and 7 as “qi.” English is not only lengthier but also breaks rules at will. While some multiples of 10, like 40, 60 and 70 sound correct, others, like 20, 30 and 50, don’t follow the same logic. While numbers greater than 20 have a recognizable pattern with tens coming before units, numbers in teens do not follow that rule. As a comparison, in Cantonese, 34 is literally read as 3 tens and a 4, and numbers never break that rule. Due to easy and sequential rules of language, an average Chinese student remembers a series of up to 10 digits, while an average American student recalls up to seven digits.

This theory sounds intriguing but is worth testing by observing Asian students born and raised speaking English as their primary language. If such students revealed signs of inferiority in their knowledge of numerals, then that might support the claim made by Gladwell. Unfortunately, the theory gets deflated by an overwhelming majority of students of Asian origin outperforming their local counterparts in America. Inexplicable educational policies and initiatives that are many times based on unique personal experiences of people in power are often painted in broader strokes.

POLICY FALLACIES

The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all public schools keep track of adequate yearly progress using seven primary guidelines, such as incoming fifth-graders doing better on standardized tests than the previous year’s fifth-graders, breaking students into groups based on performance measures, socio-economic levels and others and 95 percent of each group participating in the yearly progress. The algorithm that measured a school’s progress was inconsistent and statistically biased. Failed schools go through drastic measures like getting converted to charter schools or being run by private companies and the state office of education. Such impractical expectations of sustained progress over the years support the conspiracy theory of this policy being a belligerent attack on the public education system. An important characteristic of a quality administrator is to stay out of a teacher’s classroom.

The provost of the University of New Hampshire during her recent commencement speech expressed an emotion that many administrators in higher education could learn from. She mentioned that she stays out of the business of professors and only intervenes when they need support in getting something done. The message was clear: teachers know how to do their jobs well, and they are trained to mold young minds into productive citizens of the future. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happens in our public schools. Hundreds of initiatives are launched, including after-school reading, nutrition education, iPads for kindergartners, math programs, grit improvement, gifted and talented programs and many more. Granted, all programs represent good intention, but they also guarantee a big price tag and huge burden on the teachers. Students become lab rats and teachers become lab technicians. The experimentation goes on in thousands of public laboratories, resulting in America being the biggest spender on education in the world.

The decay of the education system is a complex problem. It is a result of consistent blend of aforementioned arguments and many others around lack of repetition, inefficient spending, standardized testing and the influx of technology in classrooms. The system needs a significant jolt.

Perhaps it is time to learn from the practices of ancient civilizations of Asia: Those who wake up early in the morning to grab the larger side of the rectangular study table from their siblings never fail to succeed.

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