Soon the doors of the nation's schools will open and children from kindergarten to the twelfth grade will return. Some will do so joyously, happy to see their classmates, and others, as Shakespeare put it, "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school." all of these students will be subject to a multi-billion-dollar deception that involves the federal government, the National Education association, PTa's, school administrators, and the teachers themselves.
To put it plainly, education sucks! Education in america is a failed institution that is failing millions of students every year. Ironically, as the system degrades, the number of tests being administered to "measure" whether students have learned anything increases. ""Dumbed down" tests for "dumbed down" students are meaningless.
In New Jersey, my home state, the number of public school students taking state exams will nearly double this year. Where the money to pay for these tests will come from is anybody's guess, but the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) requires testing in language arts and math will expand to the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades, insuring that every student will be tested every year from grades three to eight. at last count, the amount allocated to this was an astounding $23.2 million, a $7 million increase over last year.
Now multiply this against all of the other 50 states. That is, if you can multiply anything without the use of a calculator. If you have graduated from any public school since the 1960's or 70's, the odds are you can't.
In an article written by Veronique de Rugy and Kathryn Newmark, respectively a research scholar and research assistant at the american Enterprise Institute, the statistics of american education are served up with horrifying implications. They begin by reminding readers that, in the 1990s, the Republican Party pledged itself to abolish the Department of Education. The GOP platform accurately noted that, "The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place."
Well, that was then and this is now. "Now" is President George W. Bush's appalling No Child Left Behind act and his administration's commitment to throwing ever more dollars at the misnamed Department of Education. It should be called the Department of Deception.
as Ms. Rugy and Newmark point out, "the entire education budget has ballooned during the president's time in office." The Department of Education's budget has grown by 82.5 percent in real terms from $34.9 billion in FY2001 to $63.7 billion in FY2005. The President's 2006 budget calls for more spending. "The average state receives a level of grant funding that is more than 50 percent higher than when President Bush took office; no state has an increase less than 35 percent."
americans are accustomed to a federal government spending billions, but if they truly knew how little return on their tax dollars they were receiving, they might raise up in protest. On the other hand, most americans can't even get to the election booth and even fewer vote in local school board elections; a mere 12 percent! So, while the US spends a far higher percentage per primary school student than most other nations, "test scores show little improvement, dropout rates are high, and a large racial achievement gap persists."
actual achievement per dollar spent, according to education economist, Caroline Hoxby, declined by 55 to 73 percent from 1971 to 1999. Not surprisingly, however, students at private and charter schools with higher standards and with lower expenditures per pupil consistently scored higher on tests. Home-schooled kids outperform all others!
What's wrong with this picture? Martin L. Gross, the author of several books on government incompetence, identified the problem in a July commentary published in the Washington Times. "Our educators, from teachers through superintendents of schools, are academically and intellectually so inferior that the fourth grade is apparently the outer limit of their teaching abilities." With excruciating detail, he examined the scores they achieved on the SaTs and the Graduate Record Exam. Teachers score the lowest.
Then, to add to the misery index, Gross notes that, "The educational establishment has created a costly, generally unnecessary army of school bureaucrats. In 1960, there were 96,000. Now there are 215,000. Support troops, reading specialists, guidance counselors, etc., have grown from 700,000 in 1960 to 2.5 million, with no gain in academic performance."
Why don't parents protest? Because, says Gross, "they are lied to about their children's progress. Students who should get C's and D's are instead given a's and B's." Having often been rendered functionally illiterate and arithmetically incompetent, today's parents have no way of knowing their children will suffer the same fate.
So a combination of a generation or two of "dumbed down" graduates of a criminally incompetent national education system, leaves us today with far too many students who will discover that neither they, nor the nation will be able to compete in the global market place of tomorrow. Here's what to do to avoid this fate:
First step. abolish the Department of Education.
Second step. abolish all undergraduate schools of education. Open up the teaching profession to people with real degrees in specific areas of knowledge and, even better, real experience in the real world.
Third step. any teacher shown to be deliberately inflating student's grades should be subject to dismissal.
Fourth step. Eliminate all the "fuzzy" and feel-good curriculums and return to the standards that effectively educated generations that passed through the system prior to the 1960s. Education is not magic. How to educate people was already well known by the 19th century.
Fifth step: Eliminate bilingual teaching in favor of English language submersion. This will insure that children whose first language is not English can become fluent in the common language of this nation.
Sixth step. Eliminate the school-induced prescription of mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin to students. These are dangerous substances the use of which should solely be the decision of a parent and physician.
Seventh step. Do not allow any member of the NEa, a union whose purpose is to serve the interest of teachers, not students, to serve on any board of education anywhere.
Eighth step. Eliminate tenure for teachers.
Ninth step. End the "No Child Left Behind act" and return control over local schools to local school boards.
Tenth step. Return to real standards of discipline to schools, including dress codes that require neatness and a degree of modesty, punctuality, respectful behavior toward teachers and other students. Et cetera!
Eleventh step. End foolish "Zero tolerance" standards that punish even the use of an aspirin and other politically correct nonsense.
Twelfth step. Permit voluntary school prayer and recognize religious holidays as part of this nation's heritage and history.
The Department of Education will oppose this. The teacher's unions and their political lackeys will oppose this. If nothing changes, the waste of both money and minds will continue.