With 325,000 members the California Teachers Association is our nation’s largest teachers union, and as such the CTA should be expected to be in the forefront of the fight to insure that California’s students receive quality education. The CTA does list as one of its primary goals the planning and executing of “programs and strategies to enhance the quality of education for students.” Does this mean that the CTA is leading the charge to improve the educational performance of students in California’s public schools?
Apparently, it does not.
The results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were disheartening nationwide, but no more so than in California, a state known for its leadership in engineering, the sciences, and the innovative role it plays in the development of information technologies. In reading only 32% of the nationwide sample of 4th grade students tested performed at a proficient or higher level. In California only 25% performed at a proficient or higher level. For 8th grade students the nationwide percentage performing at a proficient or higher level was also 32, while the percentage for California students was 24.
In mathematics, 34% of the 4th graders and 39% of the 8th graders in the nationwide sample performed at a proficient or higher level. In California only 25% of the 4th graders and 34% of the 8th graders performed at a proficient or higher level.
Results for 8th grade California students who took the assessment in science were also poorer than the national average. Only 22% of the California 8th graders scored proficient or higher compared to the national average of 31%
US has fallen to tenth place in international rankings of the educational level of students leaving high school. Thirty years ago, the US was in first place
The nationwide results of the 2011 NAEP are so bad that terms like appalling, disgraceful, pathetic and shocking are inadequate to convey the sorry current state of public education in the United States. According to a recent Council on Foreign Relations report, the US has fallen to tenth place in international rankings of the educational level of students leaving high school. Thirty years ago, the US was in first place.
Given that California’s students are performing far more poorly in reading, math and science than the national average, one might have expected the CTA to be outraged when the Heartland Institute (an arm of Covered California, the California Health Exchange established under the Affordable Care Act) announced a $990,000 grant to the Los Angeles school district for a pilot program to see if teenagers can be taught to “deliver outreach and limited education to family and friends in and around their homes”. That is, teenage students in California public schools are to be trained as “messengers to family members.” According to a spokesperson for the Heartland Institute, the group is confident that the program will be effective in converting teenage students into advocates for Obama Care, and that they in turn “will be successful” in selling their family members on the law’s benefits and the reasons to support its implementation.
Since the CTA has not objected to this grant, one can only assume that it approves of this blatant abuse of teacher and student time and energies. Rather than focusing on improving student performance in reading, math and science, teachers will hawk the benefits of Obama Care, and if they are successful, their indoctrinated students will carry the message to their family and friends. But then as Joseph Goebbels knew so well, it is far easier to teach propaganda than facts.
We are a republic whereof one man is as good as another before the law. Under such a form of government it is of the greatest importance that all should be possessed of education and intelligence enough to cast a vote with a right understanding of its meaning. A large association of ignorant men can not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression…. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any form of government yet devised. -- Ulysses S. Grant (December 7, 1875)
Al Kaltman is a political science professor who teaches a leadership studies course at George Washington University. He is the author of Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant.
