As the cost of public education steadily increases, the end product is
less and less impressive. For example,
Could
You Have Passed the Eighth Grade in 1895? ...
or 1924?
Today's public school kids probably have never heard of Eli Whitney, the Wright Brothers,
Plymouth Rock, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, Sherlock Holmes, geography, spelling,
or good citizenship, but they probably hear a lot about Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks,
Martin Luther King, Kwanzaa, Spotted Owls, the evils of Styrofoam, and how to do
the Macarena.
The
Myth that Liberals Care About Education: Actually, educating our kids comes last
to the Left — behind indoctrinating students and supporting their political allies in the
teachers' unions. This is why the Left has supported laughable nonsense like teaching
Ebonics and bilingual education programs. It's also why the Left opposes vouchers and
even merit pay for good teachers — because the teachers' unions don't want the sad
sacks in their ranks to look bad by comparison. Liberals love to talk about education, but
education in what? Global warming? Gay marriage? Self-esteem
exercises — or reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and history?
Religious illiteracy alarms educators. Half
of American high-school seniors surveyed recently thought Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A McGill
University professor's reference to the patience of Job drew blank stares from students in his religion course. An
art history teacher in France found children were mystified by the "strange bird" (a dove representing the Holy Ghost)
common in Renaissance paintings. Until recently, such confusion was little more than fodder for faculty-room jokes,
evidence of the increasing secularism of Western societies.
Degrees in
Dishonesty. College education is a costly proposition with tuition, room and board at
some colleges topping $50,000 a year. Is it worth it? Increasing evidence suggests that
it's not. Since the 1960s, academic achievement scores have plummeted, but student college
grade point averages (GPA) have skyrocketed.
Do American Schoolkids
Need 9/11 Education? In Shira Engelhart's 4th grade class in Virginia, students asked why the
pilots on the plane didn't just say "no" to the hijackers on 9/11. In his journal, an elementary school
student offered a possible explanation that the attacks were perpetrated by German soldiers during the period
when there were frequent wars between the U.S. and Germany. When Ms. Engelhart asked her class what
happened on 9/11, eight out of 24 of her students knew that something bad occurred but were not sure what,
while the rest of her class did not know the day is significant. Some students responded that it was
their sibling's or parent's birthday. Elyse Ross, a teacher in New York City, said her school did
nothing to commemorate or educate the students about the day.
75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't
Name the First President of the U.S.. Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can
name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today [9/16/2009]. The survey
was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.
In Loco Parentis. Decades of
entrusting the federal government with our children's education has led, inevitably, to the dumbing down of an
entire nation. Our public school system has failed to provide the most basic and elementary skills, while
at the same time functioning as a ministry of propaganda for left wing causes. Nobody can seriously argue
that our kids are getting smarter. Teachers unions have done yeoman's work tirelessly crusading against
accountability. Standardized tests, we are told, are inherently biased against disadvantaged students.
Social promotions are essential to safeguard self-esteem.
Fun with Numbers. In his important
1988 book, Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch warned that "children in the U.S. are being deprived of the
basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society." Two decades later, we see
the tragic results of our near-total failure to heed Hirsch's alarm. The basic information that most
high school and college graduates don't know continues to astound those of us of all ages who managed to
receive a pretty decent, often non-public education.
Niagara Falls puts 18 at 'head
of class' rather than just one. When Niagara Falls High School seniors graduate today, they may
hear some encouraging words from the valedictorian of their class. Then again, maybe they won't.
That's because no one really knows who ranked No. 1 in the class of 2009. Niagara Falls High School
is the first in Niagara County to get rid of class rankings and valedictorians, a decision officials say was
designed out of fairness.
The Editor says...
Apparently fairness, not excellence, is what really counts. Are the Olympics unfair because only
one gold medal is given in each event? Does it matter who finishes first in the Boston Marathon?
These 18 students have some tough lessons to learn: Lessons that aren't being taught in
public schools.
High School Physics: Grade F. Physics is the
fundamental natural science. ... Yet the vast majority of high school graduates never take a course in physics
and know almost nothing about the role of the scientific revolution in creating the modern world. While
this alone constitutes criminal negligence by educators, there is an even worse crime of which they are
guilty: the students who do take physics are indoctrinated with a fundamentally false view of science.
A fairly complete history of the SAT:
The SAT and Its
Enemies. The SAT was originally an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test. When critics
objected to the word "aptitude," for reasons we'll consider in a moment, SAT came to stand for Scholastic
Assessment Test. Marketers soon realized that test and assessment have pretty much the same meaning,
making "SAT" a kind of solecism, one of those repetitive redundancies that repeats itself — bad
form for a test measuring verbal ability. So they gave up trying to make an acronym altogether.
"Assessment" was dropped, and so was "test," and "scholastic" too. Today the SAT is officially just
the SAT; the letters don't stand for anything, as if the test-makers were too timid to declare what they're
up to.
Fraud in Academia:
Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation's most prestigious and costliest universities. At Brown
University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A's. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were
either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston
Globe called Harvard's grading practices "the laughing stock of the Ivy League." Eighty percent of the
grades given at the University of Illinois are A's and B's. Fifty percent of students at Columbia
University are on the Dean's list.
Torture in America's Schools. At
a public school in West Virginia, a 4-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and autism "was 'uncooperative,' so teachers
restrained her in a chair with multiple leather straps that resembled a 'miniature electric chair.'" The girl was
later diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. "At least one of the three teachers responsible" is still at
the school. At a Texas public school, a 230-pound "special education teacher" placed a 129-pound boy of 14 "into a
prone restraint and lay on top of him because he would not stay seated." The student died. The case was
ruled a homicide but no charges were filed. The teacher "currently teaches in Virginia and is licensed to
instruct children with disabilities."
Return of the useful idiot. Capitalism
over socialism would seem to be about as settled as opinion gets, ranking somewhere up there with the earth being
round, penicillin being better than bleeding, and that Shakespeare fellow being rather talented. Primary
culprits in the survey were those under the age of 30, who gave the nod to capitalism over socialism by only
a 37 percent to 33 percent margin, with a clueless remaining 30 percent "unsure." Several
decades of politically correct leftist indoctrination in our high schools and colleges has apparently taken
its toll.
Our Fading Heritage: Civics Quiz.
Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking [this]
test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from
past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.
Do
Away With Public Schools. We could say … that children are the future. And
a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind. The
problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest
ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government.
The Return of the
Fuzzies? In the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued
for content-based standards — that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade.
The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises. When the new 1994
California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but
good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle
was on.
The Entitled: [Scroll
down] They may never thrill at a formula elegantly devised, a mission truly accomplished, a sentence well
written, a simple procedure done with care every time, an experiment perfected, a form that perfectly follows
function. ... But why should they be any different from what they are? Raised in an age when self-esteem
is all, they're told how great they are from K to 12 and may graduate without the faintest idea of
what greatness is, or demands.
The Culture of
Entitlement. Our lives are filled with measures of achievement. From cleaning our rooms as
children and taking a driver's test as teenagers to annual job reviews through the course of a career, there
are benchmarks of achievement that follow us through the entirety of our lives. As we grow, these
benchmarks become more numerous and the stakes become higher. Curiously, these benchmarks are being
consistently eroded in primary and secondary education, a stage of life when they should be most emphasized.
Standard benchmarks in educational achievement are increasingly falling by the wayside and the results are
troubling.
The Cure for
Poverty. A generation or two of American school children have grown up without a clue
about how wealth is created. If they ever think about the people who organize and create businesses,
the people who actually create wealth and carry out the innovations that cause the rest of us to prosper,
they think in terms of responsibility for bad things like pollution, discrimination, and other crimes.
Overhauling D.C. School
Overcome by Violence. D.C. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has dispatched a team of administrators and
extra security to an Anacostia middle school where three teachers have been assaulted, a 14-year-old was charged with
carrying a shotgun and students have run the hallways discharging fire extinguishers. ... "Kids sitting on desks,
coming into classrooms and knocking over books, cussing, running through the halls," said Timothy Favors, who has
visited Hart on multiple occasions because his son, a sixth-grader, is getting poor grades after doing well at
Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. "This isn't a school I would recommend for anyone. You
could have a perfectly normal child, and he would get flipped here like a pancake."
Give Me That
Old-Time Religion. [Scroll down] Suddenly, local lenders were toiling (if they survived)
in the easier liar-loan world fostered by Congress, Fannie and Freddie and guys with great tans in Los Angeles.
The old public-school system, once a tight ship in countless towns, knew that game. The schools learned
to shove another class of semi-educated bodies into the street every June and call them "graduates" the same
way lenders called zero-down-payment borrowers "homeowners."
Health
and safety reaches 'ridiculous' new heights. A survey of nearly 600 teachers revealed the most restrictive
rules being imposed in an attempt to avoid injuries and lawsuits. ... Generations of youngsters who made things out of empty
egg boxes will be dismayed to learn that some schools have banned them for fear of salmonella poisoning. And many
teachers reported bans on footballs, snowball fights, conker games and running in the playground.
Murdoch canes
US teachers. Rupert Murdoch has issued a combative challenge to the Obama Administration:
take on the American teaching unions to rescue America's failing education system. Speaking at a panel
discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Murdoch said that the greatest challenge to ensure US
competitiveness in world markets is investment in human capital — and the American public school
system had failed its students.
Ignorance reigns supreme. With
limited thinking abilities and knowledge of our heritage, we Americans set ourselves up as easy prey for charlatans,
hustlers and quacks. If we don't know the constitutional limits placed on Congress and the White House,
politicians can do just about anything they wish to control our lives, from deciding what kind of light bulbs we can
use to whether the government can take over our health care system or bailout failing businesses. We just
think Congress can do anything upon which they can get a majority vote.
Postponing reality. Some of
us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable. But that just shows how far behind the times we are. Today,
reality is optional. At the very least, it can be postponed. Kids in school are not learning? Not a
problem. Just promote them on to the next grade anyway. Call it "compassion," so as not to hurt their
"self-esteem." Can't meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school? Denounce those
standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.
District gives students exam answers, half
still flunk. The school district of Rochester, N.Y., gave teachers and students exact copies of
the questions and answers that would appear on a mandatory test, only to have officials deny wrongdoing and
watch half the students fail anyway.
Cheating? No Homework? No Problem
In Plano ISD. What's the best way to educate our children? Should it be that if they cheat,
they always get a second chance? What about late school work? Should students be allowed to turn
it in at any time, no matter how late? One North Texas school district is considering some drastic changes
like these.
Karl
Marx is Not the Father of Capitalism. Sen. Barack Obama won for a simple reason: historical
amnesia. I once asked a room full of college students who the father of capitalism was. Crickets
began chirping as blank stares shot my way. "Oh, come on," I prompted. "Does anyone want to take
a guess?" Finally, one bold student blurted out, "Isn't it Karl Marx?" ... Sadly, this is a true story.
How to Fire an Incompetent Teacher: Joe
Klein is chancellor of New York City's public school system, a monopoly so heavily regulated that sometimes
it's unable to fire even dangerous teachers. The series of steps a principal must take to dismiss an
instructor is Byzantine. "It's almost impossible," Klein complains. … The regulations are so
onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher.
You Can't Be
Half-Socialist. Our shoddy educational curriculum that has left most younger Americans so
deficient in the study of history that vast numbers of them think George Washington was a Civil War general,
or a lumberman who chopped down cherry trees. They have no real understanding of the economic system
that allowed us to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation since the Roman Empire ruled most of the
known world 2000 years ago.
Don't Know Much About History.
"Whenever the people are well-informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own
government." No doubt the Founding Fathers' faith in self-government would be challenged today with the
reality of how little Americans know about their heritage. ... Shockingly, in some cases students knew less at
the end of their college years than when they first set foot on campus.
No Teacher Left Behind. There are
some truly shocking statistics about teacher training in this week's report from the Education Schools
Project. According to "Educating School Teachers," three-quarters of the country's 1,206 university-level
schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers. More than half of teachers
are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards (often accepting 100% of applicants) and with
"the least accomplished professors." When school principals were asked to rate the skills and preparedness
of new teachers, only 40% on average thought education schools were doing even a moderately good job.
Three
strikes and you're in! Every year, hundreds of would-be classroom teachers fail the MTEL, the
Massachusetts Test for Education Licensure. According to Charles Glenn at the Boston University School
of Education, independent evaluations of teacher tests like the MTEL put the skills required at the eighth- to
10th-grade level. Unfortunately, this is still too high for about 40 percent of the test takers each
year. So last week, the Democrats of the Massachusetts Senate voted unanimously for a waiver program
covering wannabe teachers who fail the test at least three times.
Testing,
Testing. These exams represent the first nationwide attempts to determine what the students know about
American history and culture. And this year's report is as sobering as last year's was. "The overall
average score for the approximately 7,000 seniors who took the American civic literacy exam was 54.2 percent,
an F," the report says. And at some leading schools, seniors scored worse than freshmen. "Students
apparently 'unlearned' what they once knew," the report says, a chilling example of "negative learning."
American Education Fails Because It
Isn't Education. The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America … was written
by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan
Administration. While there in 1981 - 1982, Charlotte found the "mother lode"
hidden away at the Department. In short, she found all of the education establishment's
plans for restructuring America's classrooms. Not only did she find the plans for what
they intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most importantly why.
Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated her life to getting that
information into the hands of parents, politicians and the news media.
High
Self-Esteem, Low Test Scores. There are new studies and new polls that strongly suggest that we
are breeding increasingly stupid kids here in America. … They have no idea why December 7, 1941,
was a day of infamy. They also don't know what "infamy" means. What makes the situation even
more pathetic is that these kids, for the most part, have a terrifically high opinion of themselves.
Don't know much about math.
Today's elementary education majors actually score below the math SAT average of the typical college-bound high-school
senior — a serious problem if teaching math well first requires mathematical aptitude. This
comes from a startling June report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, which found that the average
would-be elementary-ed major scored a 483 on the math portion of the SAT as compared with 515 for the average
college-bound student.
Cash
Cow Stampede: Colleges of Education Not Up to Snuff. The short story is that our colleges
of education are giving Ph.D.s to researchers who aren't qualified to hold a Ph.D. These people, in turn,
are providing the research on which public school policy decisions and teacher training is based. [Arthur]
Levine surveyed deans, faculty, education school alumni, K-12 school principals, and reviewed 1,300 doctoral
dissertations and finds the research seriously lacking.
Dumbing Down America's
Colleges: Wake Forest University, Bates, Bowdoin, and a few other small schools have recently
decided to make the SAT optional for students applying for admission. Their argument for getting rid of
these tests is that it will fling open the doors to "diversity" among the student body. Wake Forest
President Nathan Hatch made the ludicrous claim that jettisoning the SAT would help the school, "move closer
to the goals of greater educational quality and opportunity."
Goodbye SAT? "By making
the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups
of students who are currently underrepresented at selective universities," said Martha Allman, director of
admissions, in the WFU's new release. She argued that downplaying the role of standardized tests would
demonstrate how the university values "individual academic achievement" and "talent and character." The
change is also supposed to help "diversify" college's application base.
The Editor says...
Allow me to cut through the candy coating. What's really happening here is that Wake Forest University is
lowering its standards (to zero) in order to admit students who are not qualified for higher education, as
another facet of "affirmative action." The harsh reality is that some students do well in school (and on
the SAT) and others do not. Some will go on to be doctors and rocket scientists and others will someday
push mops and brooms in America's gas stations and burger joints. The worst thing the university can
do is to homogenize the student body and presume that all incoming students are equally capable, when they
are not.
What's Up, Doc?
The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows. Maya Angelou, who regularly refers to
herself as "Dr. Angelou," has honorary doctorates only, and no undergraduate degree to go with them. As
an African American and a woman, she may well have more honorary doctorates than anyone in the history of
this strange ritual.
The War on Common Sense: With
Darwin as king of the classroom and conscience but a mute passerby, the Left hurls endless invectives at the United States,
denouncing both its greatness and that of its Founders, and almost nobody says a word. Some want to say something but
they are too embarrassed, while others do not even know they are allowed to speak.
Good teachers are
key to student achievement, but bad ones are hard to fire. A Cleveland teacher would be the
first to tell you that not much learning went on in his high school classroom last spring. Students
typically chatted with each other or joined an ongoing card game in the back of the room while he tried to get
them to do their work. Kids who weren't even supposed to be in the class walked in, sat down and were
dealt a hand. On a particularly bad day in March, one of the teens grabbed the teacher's
briefcase — containing his medication and checkbook — and raced out the
door and down the hall.
Memphis
High School: Reading, Writing and Bumping & Grinding. The purveyors of porn have got to be chuffed after
watching Memphis school kids hump (en masse) both the floor and each other during Mitchell High School's "talent show"
this month. Yep, it doesn't look as if sellers of smut are going to be taking an additional night job to pay bills
anytime soon because they have formally tapped the teenage market. At least in Memphis they have. Good job,
Memphis.
Dumb
down class, asks principal memo. The principal of an East Harlem high school last month
stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes. … One teacher who received the memo said
she and her colleagues were "outraged," especially because the school is one of 200 where teachers will
receive $3,000 bonuses if their schools improve. "It's like bribery," she said. "It's not the
achievement. It's just the grades."
NSU professor loses job in dispute
over grades. At the end of this semester, Steven Aird will lose his job as an associate professor of biology
at Norfolk State University for giving out too many F's. He is not going quietly. Aird says his termination is
part of a dumbing-down of academic standards at NSU — a move by administrators to intimidate faculty members into passing
undeserving students and rewarding inferior work.
Palm
Beach County School sued over 'shamefully low' graduation rate. Calling Palm Beach County's high
school graduation rate "shamefully low," the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday [3/18/2008] sued local
educators to churn out more diplomas. In a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of parents and students,
the ACLU accused the Palm Beach County School Board and Superintendent Art Johnson of failing to provide
students with a high-quality education guaranteed under the state constitution.
The Editor says...
Yes, but... (1) If not everyone gets a diploma, that means the standards are high already, and (2) if
anyone gets a diploma, that means the diplomas are attainable by students who are willing to
apply themselves. Students who flunk out of school have only themselves to blame. I almost
flunked out of high school (it can now be revealed), but it was because I never cracked open a book.
Teens losing touch
with historical references. Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk
challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack
important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." … Among 1,200 students
surveyed, 43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900 [and] 52% could identify the theme
of 1984.
Report:
Philadelphia schools unsafe, unjust. Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit
violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is "dysfunctional and unjust,"
according to a report by the district's safe-schools advocate. In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The
Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are
not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
Hillary Clinton:
When Bill Clinton returned to the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1983, he appointed his wife to lead the education-reform movement,
the centerpiece of his agenda. After holding hearings in all 75 counties, Mrs. Clinton was instrumental in raising the state
sales tax by 1 percentage point, significantly increasing spending on primary and secondary education and establishing
teacher-competency exams, which, it turned out, could be passed with eighth-grade language and math skills. A decade-and-a-half
after her reforms were enacted, 87 percent failed the state's 11th-grade exit exam in math….
Oregon
Senate: Former prostitutes should be able to teach. Women who have been convicted on
misdemeanor prostitution charges could be eligible for an Oregon teaching license, under legislation that
passed the state Senate Friday [5/11/2007], 20-to-7.
More
than half of minority teacher applicants fail test. More than half of black and Hispanic applicants
for teaching jobs in Massachusetts have failed a crucial state licensing test. Since the start of the test
nearly a decade ago, 52 percent of Hispanics and 54 percent of blacks failed the writing portion of
the test compared to a 23 percent failure rate among white applicants.
Public Schools, Public Menace.
Public schools can cripple your child's ability to read. Public schools can wreck your child's ability to
do math, with "fuzzy" math curriculums. Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose
who teaches your child and what he is taught.
Would a name change help
algebra students? Would Algebra 2 be as difficult if it were called something else? State Sen.
Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, recently told a gathering of Kent County school board members that he believes more students
would pass the upper-level math course if it were called something less scary.
The
Dumbing Down of America: Trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem. And if one
judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made
marvelous progress. … However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the performances of high school
seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card."
Hand over the cell. Principals in at least
three suburban schools have searched students' cellphone text messages when they suspected the students of
cheating, drug abuse or other school violations. Officials in the Douglas and Jefferson school districts
say policies that allow them to search lockers, backpacks and cars parked on school grounds also authorize
searches of cellphones when there is a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing.
The Editor says...
The most practical solution to the problem of cheating via cell phones would be to blanket the school buildings
with wideband RF noise to jam all cellular calls. Or build the schools with screened walls and ceilings to
prevent signals from entering or leaving. Jamming is not permitted by the FCC; however, it is routinely
done in other countries (e.g., Israel), where
the overall benefit to society is more important than some individual's hurt feelings. And
in my opinion it should be done in this country, at least in middle schools, high schools, libraries,
jails and prisons. Jamming should also be permitted on private property such as restaurants, movie theaters,
churches and museums. But I predict it never will be, because the FCC will argue that police and fire
departments need to be able to communicate everywhere, all the time. That's just a red herring. The
government's greatest concern is control, not public safety.
Millersport school
locked down briefly this morning after a mercury spill. Officials locked down the Millersport
Junior-Senior High School this morning after a mercury spill, which appears to be the result of a broken
thermometer.
The Editor says...
One broken thermometer and they lock down the school? Incredible! When I was in school, the
science lab kept several pounds of mercury on hand for the old "homemade barometer" demonstration. When
I was a little kid, a broken thermometer was an opportunity to roll a little blob of mercury around in the
palm of my hand -- until I dropped it and it disappered into the carpet. If mercury is as dangerous as
the over-reactive government nannies would now have us believe, how did any of us survive the 1960's?
States Help Schools Hide
Minority Scores. States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No
Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress. With
the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly two million students
when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.
Remedial U: One might
question whether a significant portion of college students should even bother signing up for post-secondary
classes at all. "Over one-third of first- and second-year college students have taken remedial courses,"
according to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing. … Of those who take such classes,
two-thirds seek instruction in math while more than a quarter take remedial reading courses. A tenth
of those requiring remediation need guidance with study skills, which makes you really wonder why they are
in college in the first place.
Teaching America:
Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the
basic facts of their own country's history. This year's National Assessment of Education Progress (our "Nation's
Report Card") revealed that over 50-percent of our nation's high-school students — our population reaching
voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History.
No grades, no homework,
no tests: Students set the rules at this New York City school. At this school,
students don't get grades, don't have homework, don't take tests, and don't even have to go
to class — unless they want to. "You can do basically anything at any time, and it's
just a lot more fun because sometimes when you need a break at regular schools you can't
get it," said Sophia Bennett Holmes, 12, an aspiring singer-actress-fashion designer.
State faults teachers of English
learners. Hundreds of students in Arizona are trying to learn English from teachers who don't
know the language, state officials say. The kids are taught by teachers who don't know English grammar
and can't pronounce English words correctly. Last year, for example, a Mesa teacher stood in front of a
class of language learners and announced, "Sometimes, you are not gonna know some." A teacher in
Phoenix's Creighton Elementary District asked her kids, "If you have problems, to who are you going to ask?"
Get A Public School Clue.
"Once as revered as Mom and apple pie, the public school brand has crashed and burned spectacularly since the
1970s, when the general public and most parents believed their children's schools were better than when they
attended them," [Nora] Carr observes. "Long-term studies by Public Agenda show that the percentage of
the public expressing a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in America's public schools has declined
from 54 percent in 1977 to just 37 percent in 2005."
Education and Citizenship:
The report finds that the typical undergraduate's familiarity with the history and institutions of the American
regime improves negligibly during his or her college years, and it's not due to a lack of room for
improvement. What's more, the price tag attached to any given degree turns out to be relatively irrelevant
when it comes to these subjects. Students attending expensive schools do not generally score higher on
the survey.
Lindsay Lohan offers words of
condolence to Altman's family: 'Be adequite'. Had she been on one of her legendary party
benders? Or was this Exhibit A for the indictment of America's education system? … Patt
Morrison, a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, [called] the letter "alarmingly incoherent" and questioning
what it was Lohan had learnt at the Long Island schools that gave her straight As.
Low
scores + delays = spin. Let's do the math. North Carolina education leaders had
planned — for a third time — to delay release of end-of-grade math test results for
3rd and 8th grade students. They pushed the release to next Thursday — two
days after Tuesday's election. But, withering under the avalanche of
skepticism over the reasons for delay, officials changed course.
Can You
Say 'Good Morning Boys and Girls'? Only If You're a Bigot. If the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC) has its way, teachers won't be able to acknowledge that there are boys and girls in
their classrooms. Or that boys are any different from girls.
Physics By Induction: The Genius of Learning
Science The Proper Way. It seems that science is not taught in the public middle schools
today — it has been replaced by … hands on "experiments" which are really pointless
diversions. At the high school level, most students are exposed to some science, and
most are required to take a physics class. But these physics classes generally suffer
from a serious [methodological] problem.
More
Embarrassing Education News. For many years North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction has
set the cut score — the percentage of questions a student must get right to receive a proficient
designation on end-of-grade tests — so low that on some tests students could meet the standard
simply by guessing.
Scientifically Wrong, But Politically
Correct: Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science
textbooks, to absurd effect. Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great
scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series. It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and
half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive
spouse. In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist
Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament. Edison's picture is smaller.
How To Teach Your Child: What It Means To
Learn. Pick up any grade school science textbook and you will see the same problem. Page
one usually displays in vivid color a diagram of the structure of an atom. The chapter tells the
students that an atom is a tiny unit of matter, that it has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons,
that the nucleus is surrounded by electrons, and so on. The question that such books make no
attempt to answer is: Why should a child believe this drawing any more than he believes the
Saturday morning cartoons?
Vote or Else. Shocked to learn
that only 37 percent of students vote, an English professor required her students to
vote. ... George Leef of the John Locke Foundation disapproves: "The job of an English professor is to
teach English. That's it. Adding non-academic requirements to a course is objectionable, no
matter how important the professor may believe them to be."
Colleges accused of
failing civics test. Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of
American history, government and politics in a new national survey, while students at Stanford
University didn't do much better, getting a D.
Dumbing down
democracy. As part of a program to strengthen the understanding of America's history and
political institutions — what it calls "civic literacy" — [the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute] commissioned a survey of more than 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 four-year
colleges and universities nationwide. The students were given 60 multiple-choice questions, testing
their knowledge of US history, government, foreign affairs, and economics. The results were atrocious.
'A' Is for Awful. Self-evaluations
by Michigan schools are meaningless. Self-esteem has run amok. The Detroit News reports: "One
Detroit elementary, for example, gave itself a perfect score for its facilities despite being closed in
October because it started sinking into the ground."
Our gold-star world:
While parents and politicians have been pounding the table demanding greater academic performance in
the "Three R's," social scientists, psychologists and education bureaucrats have slowly, but ingeniously
reframed the battle onto more favorable turf. Rather than compete head-to-head in a battle we cannot
win, these dedicated teachers and administrators have elevated the importance of the one area where no
country can compete with us: Self-esteem.
When Teachers Flunk, They Sue. By
requiring minority teacher applicants to pass a basic competency test, the Board of Education of New York City
may have discriminated against them, a federal court of appeals has ruled. The test measures their
mastery of basic college material, including science, math, history, and the arts, as well as written
communication skills in an essay. To pass, applicants must answer about 66 percent of the questions
correctly and score at least 60 percent on the essay. The applicants demonstrated their scores on
the examination were consistently lower than white applicants, the court stated. "Between 1993 and 1999,
the average pass rate for white test takers ranged from 91% to 94%, while the average pass rate for African
American candidates ranged from 51% to 62%, and the average pass rates for Latino candidates ranged from 47%
to 55%," the court stated. All of the minority applicants "tended" to do the worst on the essay section
of the test, according to the court.
Lecturer
calls for spelling amnesty on students' top 20 errors. Faced with a flood of basic spelling
mistakes, you might expect a university lecturer to demand his students pay more attention to the dictionary.
But one don is so fed up with having to correct his undergraduates' errors that he is calling for something
rather more unorthodox — a spelling amnesty.
History Without History, Spelling Without
Spelling: Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school,
but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the
man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century. Yet the 16-year-old does
remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment
camps. "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said.
Dumbed Down and Out in High
School: Some San Jose area teachers are dumping the D as a passing grade. They say students
who are doing the minimum to get by will just have to work a little harder. California's public
universities won't accept anything below C- on an academic transcript.
The English in Us: In 1910, when Robert Frost
taught at a high school in rural New Hampshire, he expected his students to memorize poems by William Wordsworth,
Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling. Today it is hard to imagine a high school
teacher assigning a similar program. … Nowadays few high school and also not many college students have
read Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, or Kipling.
Public Schools are Not Accountable to
Parents. The past several decades have witnessed the systematic "dumbing down" of public
education: the curriculum got diluted with non-academic subjects and frivolous activities; proven
methods for teaching reading, writing, math, science and reasoning got replaced with unproven, inferior
methods; and objectivity got sacrificed to "political correctness" propaganda, such as socialism,
environmentalism, multiculturalism and moral relativism.
Tempers run high at
school board meeting. Attorneys for the Mountain Empire Unified School District have determined
that a former teacher accused of molesting a 9-year-old girl in his class cannot be blocked from serving on
the school board.
Math Instruction Doesn't Add Up.
California's standards call for students to learn algebra in eighth grade. Yet the graduation exam was
postponed because so many students were flunking the math portion of the test, which required only a
55 percent [score]. Only the hardest questions required high school math skills.
Civics
survey: engaged, but not informed. Nearly one in four Oregon high school students surveyed
identified Gov. Ted Kulongoski as a U.S. senator, and only one in four correctly identified Gordon Smith and
Ron Wyden as the state's actual U.S. senators.
Felon kept
job after principal got notice. In May 2003, a probation officer told a Jackson Public Schools
principal that a woman who works with children in an elementary classroom had just been convicted of dealing
cocaine. But William Patterson, then principal at Wilson Elementary School, didn't share the information
with his superiors at the central office.
College
stupidity: Parents are paying an average tuition of $21,000, and at some colleges
over $40,000, to have their children exposed to anti-Americanism and academic nonsense. According
to a 2000 American Council of Trustees and Alumni study, "Losing America's Memory: Historical
Illiteracy in the 21st Century," not one of the top 50 colleges and universities today requires American
history of its graduates.
Pacifists
versus peace. One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the
world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas,
derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts. "Peace" movements are among
those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities.
Academics KO Grammar Again. [Nan]
Miller taught writing at Meredith College in Raleigh for two and a half decades. … "From my
conversations with senior faculty at both North Carolina State and UNC, I learned the following," she
reports. "The new English 101 is a continuation of the 'disastrous' public school trend to
have students work in groups." "The new English 101 continues the public school trend to go
easy on grammar gaffes, so enrollees in upper level classes have 'startling' problems with
correctness." She means linguistically, not politically.
Q:
Where is the United Kingdom? A: You're standing in it. One in five British children
cannot find the United Kingdom on a map of the world, research has found. The study ... also showed one
in 10 children were not able to name a single continent and more than 20,000 children in London did not know
they lived in England's capital city.
British schools told it's no longer
necessary to teach right from wrong. Schools would no longer be required to teach children the
difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum. Instead,
under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to
encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs".
Leaving "School" Out of High School:
Most students will do what is expected of them, but so often more is expected on the athletic fields, in
after-school clubs and jobs, in volunteer organizations, and in social circles than in the classroom.
School must be more of a priority in high school if students are to succeed in college and beyond.
The Race to the Bottom: Keeping an Eye on State
Standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students to be "proficient" in math
and reading by 2014, the precedent-setting 2002 federal law also allows each state to determine its own level
of proficiency. It's an odd discordance at best. It has led to the bizarre situation in which some
states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other
states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards.
Ex-dean
says Harvard run like day care. Harvard University leaders are running the school like "a day
care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than
teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.
The Confusion on Campus. It is hard
not to get the feeling that there is something amiss at American schools. … Parents preparing to
shell out a small fortune for their children's education will want to read [Harry] Lewis's book as
they ask themselves: What exactly are we paying for?
The Arrogance of the Not-My-Fault
Generation. Having worked in the field of education for most of my professional life, I find it
incredibly frightening that teachers with perfectly honorable intentions can end up losing their jobs and
schools lose money over incidents such as this.
Study
Paints a Bleak Picture of Chicago Public School Grads' College Success. Of every 100 freshmen
entering a Chicago public high school, only about six will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they're in
their mid-20s, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Thursday [4/20/2006] by the Consortium on
Chicago School Research. The prospects are even worse for African-American and Latino male freshmen,
who only have about a three percent chance of obtaining a bachelor's degree by the time they're 25.
Birth leave sought for girls.
Kayla Lewis, a senior at East High School, asked school-board members last month to establish maternity
leave for students who are new mothers. Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for
at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized
with unexcused absences.
The Editor says...
These ignorant girls are determined to give birth to illegitimate bastard offspring
so they can get on the welfare state gravy train and blame society for their poverty.
Fifteen years later (maybe sooner) the cycle repeats. The school is merely accomodating
and enabling these girls, rewarding their negligence, ignorance and poor judgement. Instead, the
school officials should be ostracizing, humiliating and shaming them all for the betterment of society.
Dropout
nation? Time magazine's latest cover story, "Dropout Nation," illustrates a serious
educational crisis — not in the nation's high schools, which are bad enough, but among
the nation's writers and editors. One critical lesson our schools have failed to teach
aspiring journalists is that when something sounds too bad to be true, it probably isn't.
How Low Can We Go? SAT
scores dropped significantly this year. Blame the schools, not the test. … Colleges
and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the
new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know?
A new civil
right: I never knew — until "The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University" told
me — that it was a civil right to get a high-school diploma now matter how little you know, and
consequently to have a high-school diploma that certifies precisely nothing about your abilities and which
therefore has roughly no value in the job market.
Giving out bad
Marx: Love, hate, war, jealousy, greed, charity, faith, hope, despair: these are the
universals of human experience, and great and ancient literature speaks to us about these themes from
across the years. Sadly, a small-mindedness has infected Australia's education system, producing an
obsession with politics and power relationships that has infected the nation's classrooms like a mould.
Boca Raton
high school eases penalties for students' swearing. Students say they hear a lot of
profanity on television, and a high school easing its penalties for swearing now says television
is where they should look for model language.
Higher education in decline,
Part II. A professor said that while he was trying to help a student with a problem, he asked
her, "What is 20,000 minus 600?" He went on to say, "She literally could not answer without the
calculator." He rhetorically questioned, "Should a person receive a college degree that cannot answer that
in their head?" … Such students are academic cripples and don't belong in college in the first place.
College Course
Analyzes 'Sex and the City'. The class has it all: oodles of talk about sex, man-hating
theories (the most distinguished tradition of feminist scholarship), and academic standards so low that an
anencephalic gorilla or a football player (presuming any difference between the two) can easily pass.
Who says there are no
stupid questions? People who actually have college degrees have asked me some equally
brilliant questions, like the following: "Why do you consider homosexuality to be abnormal
simply because most people don't do it? Or how about this one: "Why do you talk about
us trans-sexuals as if we are somehow different from other people?" Perhaps my favorite is
the following: "What makes you think that all illegal aliens have broken the law."
What happened to
history? We rarely mention our forebears. These were the millions of less fortunate
Americans who built the country, handed down to us our institutions, and died keeping them safe. Such
amnesia about them was not always so. Public acknowledgment of prior generations characterized the best
orations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who looked for guidance from, and gave thanks
to, their ancestors. We rarely do.
George Washington, say
who? Tests, surveys and studies further confirm America's increasing ignorance. A test of
high school seniors, for example, found that only one in ten was proficient in American history. A survey
of fourth graders found that seven of ten thought the original thirteen colonies included Illinois, Texas and
California. Six of ten couldn't say why the Pilgrims came to America. Only seven percent of fourth
graders could name "an important event" that took place in Philadelphia in 1776. When seniors at the
nation's top 55 universities were asked to name America's victorious general at the Battle of Yorktown,
only 34 percent named George Washington.
Study Shows Most College Students
Lack Skills. Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common
tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food. Those are the
sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students
as they approach the start of their careers.
What's More Important — Performance in
Sports or in Academics? Students who do good academic work in high school and who are also good
athletes get much more recognition for their sports achievements than they do for their academic work, even
though they may have put forward the same high level of effort for both.
Canceled spelling bee reinstated.
A school superintendent in Rhode Island reversed a decision by administrators who canceled the district's annual spelling
bee because they thought the event's awarding of just one winner violated the federal No Child Left Behind
Act's aim that all children should succeed.
Equal Rights, Equal
Opportunity, and Now Equal Outcome. For nearly half a century, we have gone through integration,
suitability, equality, equity, adequacy, and now we are looking at equal outcome. And, it doesn't seem
to matter that the only way to accomplish equal outcome is by focusing all of the attention on the worst
students and by lowering the standards needed to pass. In addition, it means abandoning those students
who are above the lowered standards. The end goal is not to produce smart students but to produce equal
students. It is the only possible way to produce equality in learning — it's simply called
"dumbing down." It doesn't seem to matter that equality cannot be given or bought — it must
be earned, and that's this the one thing that hasn't been tried.
Striving for mediocrity: The war
against excellence. When my oldest son went through one of my towns "excellent" public middle
schools, I was dismayed at the school's dismal lack
of focus on academics. The classes seemed more geared at social conditioning than at
teaching anything challenging and interesting. In a science class, my son learned no
science at all in the first two weeks. They spent lots of time discussing rules, getting
along, self-esteem, and related watered-down gruel.
TV and Test Scores
Don't Mix. A new study finds that children who have TV sets in their bedrooms
score lower on school tests than those who don't, according to the New York Times. … The
issue may have more to do with parental control. Parents may not be aware if their
children are up all night watching television, or if they are watching inappropriate
programming.
Gym lite: Gym classes
used to encourage physical fitness through calisthenics and dodge ball games, but now there's a new
trend in physical education: cup stacking. Kids don't run or jump in this game, and
no one suffers the humiliation of being last picked for the team.
Open education
to innovation. Quoting the Russian immigrant father of one of the five
students selected to represent the U.S. in the International Physics Olympiad: "I don't
like saying this but math and physics are not the strong side of American schools." He
says that from what he has observed in his daughter's educational experience here, what
U.S. students learn in twelfth-grade math classes, Russian students study in eighth and
ninth grades.
Believe it or
not. Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., enforces an academic policy that defies
belief. "Success Equals Effort" (SEE) is a policy where 60 percent of a freshman's
grade is based on effort and the rest on academic performance. [For example...] Imagine
that a freshman gets an A for effort in his algebra class but has virtually no grasp of the
material, earning him an F grade. Under the college's SEE policy, the student would be
assigned a C for the course.
How
Title IX is holding us back in Athens: Should the gold medals be divided
equally among the participating countries? Of course not, nor should money be
allocated equally to everyone who shows up. Yet that is what Title IX regulations
impose on our schools and colleges.
Public School Gets a Lesson In Work
Ethic. Day in, day out, students in American public schools … either witness failure go
uncorrected or see it portrayed as success. Finally, one problem too large to be ignored has prompted
the very kind of action that will await many inadequately prepared students once they enter the adult
workforce, particularly if they choose to embark upon a career in private enterprise where they will be forced
to learn quickly that more is required from them than just showing up for work; results are demanded.
2 lazy 2 teach.
Have you checked your child's summer reading list? Beware: Some lame-brained school officials have
decided to ditch the sonnets of Shakespeare for the tripe of Tupac.
Should We Have Government
Schools? While billions more dollars are poured into this system, children
keep getting dumber and school campuses are becoming ever more dangerous places to
be. Can this really be accidental, or is there a more sinister plan for the
"state's children"?
Panel Finds Environmental
Education Lacking in Science. A report issued April 2 [1997] by a panel
of scientists, economists, and educators concludes that many environmental education materials
used in the nation's schools do not give students enough science and economics to enable them
to understand the complex environmental challenges of the next century.
National Teacher
Certification Labeled a "Hoax". Despite the exalted rank implied by the
term "National Board Certified," the content knowledge required of K-12 teachers who want
to earn such a title through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is only
that of an advanced high school class, according to a recent commentary published in the
Teacher College Record.
"Science" and the
Fictitious World Of Educators: There is much more science used in repairing an
automatic washer than there is in the study of astronomy. Astronomers would more
accurately be called hobbyists than scientists. Most astronomers are not capable
of building or making a telescope, or grinding their own lenses and mirrors. Most
astronomers do not know how to do anything except observe and describe heavenly bodies,
and then arrive at false conclusions about the nature of our planetary
systems — conclusions which they must alter every few years as new
information is gathered.
To Study vs To
Memorize: The current educational system is built on the false assumption that
memorizing a subject is the same thing as studying a subject. Yet, in reality studying
and memorizing are two very different processes. To study something is to explore all
of the possibilities of that thing. To study a thing is to take it apart, look at the
different aspects of it, weigh one aspect against another and draw some conclusions about
the nature of that thing.
I Are a Student. No wonder
so many whining citizens loathe profit. Profit points out in stark clarity their own shortcomings as they
slink through life dependent upon the State and its immoral depredations on their betters.
"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
Effective State
Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card. In the post-9/11 world, it's more important than
ever for young Americans to learn the history of their nation, the principles on which it was founded, the
workings of its government, the origins of our freedoms, and how we've responded to past threats from
abroad. Yet assessment after assessment and study after study shows that history is the core subject
about which young Americans know least.
Needham High School Halts
Publication of Honor Roll. Needham High School has abandoned its long-standing practice of
publishing the names of students who make the honor roll in the local newspaper. Principal Paul Richards
said a key reason for stopping the practice is its contribution to students' stress level in "This high
expectations-high-achievement culture."
[The article above hints at the real reason, but never quite lays it out: The honor roll is no longer
published because it might hurt the feelings of the other students. Keep reading...]
Schools banish class honor
rolls: Nashville officials fear underachievers could be offended.
In England...
A show of hands 'can
harm shy children'. Asking pupils to put their hands up when they think they know the answer to
a question in class could make quiet children fall behind, according to government advice. Researchers
have identified a group of youngsters aged between seven and 11 who struggle to keep up with classmates despite
doing well in previous years.
Anti-intellectualism: Why Nerds are
Unpopular. I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same
story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse
correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Cut on the Bias. Want
to stop educators from dumbing down books and tests? Laugh at them.
Textbook publishers do back flips to avoid
offense. Several years ago, a bias and sensitivity review panel working on contract for the
federal government ruled that, when testing the reading comprehension of fourth graders, any mention of owls
ought to be verboten. The reason — that owls are taboo to the Navajo and might upset
someone of that ancestry — may have seemed farfetched, had the panel not made an even stranger
decision to eliminate a story about a dolphin. That story was judged to be "regionally biased" and
potentially confusing to kids who didn't live near an ocean.
"Buffy" class has a stake in
education. The lights dim, and on the classroom screen comes yet another installment of "Buffy
the Vampire Slayer," the story of a hot blond babe who, for seven critically acclaimed seasons, Kung-Fu fought
a relentless onslaught of demons plaguing Sunnydale, Calif.
The Historians vs. American History: It is now
obvious that American children know very little about the history of their own nation. This past year the
U.S. Department of Education released its History Report Card and the results were predictably awful:
57 percent of high school seniors flunked even a basic knowledge of American history, and
only 10 percent tested at grade level.
Study says "Language police" are
harming children. Activist groups acting as "language police" are exerting increasing control
over American schools, resulting in bored, cynical and "dumbed down" children, according to a three-year study
of education policy.
Book review: The
Language Police — How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Before Anton
Chekhov and Mark Twain can be used in school readers and exams, they must be vetted by a bias and sensitivity
committee. The New York State Education Department omitted mentioning Jews in an Isaac Bashevis Singer
story about prewar Poland, or blacks in Annie Dillard's memoir of growing up in a racially mixed town.
California rejected a reading book because The Little Engine That Could was male. Diane Ravitch
maintains that America's students are compelled to read insipid texts that have been censored and bowdlerized,
issued by publishers who willingly cut controversial material from their books — a case of the
bland leading the bland.
A Nation Still at Risk: This month
marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of one federal report that did not end up on a shelf gathering
dust, but instead inspired significantly increased spending on public education, although this ultimately
produced little progress in student achievement. The report included two of the most famous statements
ever made about the nation's public schools, that we were facing "a rising tide of mediocrity," and "If an
unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists
today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
What's Wrong With Education
Today: Make-believe equality at the high school level fools nobody, least of all the kids.
White kids at Menlo-Atherton refer to the non-honors courses as "ghetto courses," while a black kid who enrolled
in honors courses had his friends demand to know why he was taking "that white-boy course."
Making the Grade: Michigan's public
schools are upset at the prospect of being graded in the same way teachers grade students.
First Amendment survey finds knowledge
lacking. More than two-thirds of college students and administrators who participated in a national
survey were unable to remember that freedom of religion and the press are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Errors and Censorship: U.S.
textbooks tell distorted story. For years, the textbooks used by most American children have been
riddled with errors. Recent publicity has once again brought to light the issue of factually incorrect
yet politically-correct textbooks.
Textbooks are Politically Correct -- And
Inaccurate. The need to please or not offend every possible constituency has resulted
in books that are inaccurate, trivial and boring.
California Offers Textbook Case of Political
Correctness: A textbook review process in California has changed or eliminated references to
everything from the Founding Fathers (search) to hot dogs, leaving many to charge the state with
distorting history in the name of political correctness.
Why U.S. students flunk geography:
We didn't have TV or the Internet. All we had were newspapers, magazines, school atlases, maps from gas
stations. Today's American students have television, the Internet, videos, travel books, magazines,
atlases, CDROMs, and yet they seem to have a kind of cognitive block against learning geographic facts.
Modern Education Kills. It makes us
unfit to live.
Why Christians don't belong in
government schools - Part 1: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America
the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
The rantings of a right-wing fanatic? No, it's the conclusion of the National Commission on Excellence
in Education, convened 21 years ago by U.S. Education Secretary Terrence Bell.
Study Reveals Five Decades of "Dumbing Down"
in American Education: A new poll finds that American college seniors today are just slightly
more knowledgeable than high-school graduates of half a century ago.
American education: Running
hard, and last: As the debate over how to fix America's schools continues with politicians
beholden in one way or another to teachers' unions suggesting that it is the advocates of vouchers, tax
credits and home schooling who are the true enemies of education, some recent statistics from the Paris-based
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are worthy of note.
Teacher on leave
after distributing letter: He says in a letter to other teachers that most of the poorly behaved
students at the school are African-American. "Class is something they do between the passing periods,
lunch or nutrition break, when they chase each other in the hallways, into classrooms, yelling at the top of their lungs…"
Cognitive Child Abuse in Our Math
Classrooms: The central cause of our children's incompetence in math is not the schools' lack of
"accountability," but their embrace of the whole-math approach, which undermines the student's conceptual capacity.
Study decries lack of teacher
qualifications in public schools: An estimated one in four public middle- and high-school
classes is taught by a teacher not trained in the subject - and the problem is much worse in schools
that serve poor and minority students.
Educated idiots: John
Taylor Gatto says in the September Harper's
that our factory school system is doing exactly what it was designed to do when American educators copied it,
in toto, from the Prussian model 150 years ago. It is producing a populace of uncritical,
barely-educated worker bees, suited mostly to punching buttons, consuming the latest new gadgets
and mindlessly watching TV.
High Schools Flunk Science: The vast
majority of high school graduates never take a course in physics and know almost nothing about the role of the
scientific revolution in creating the modern world. While this alone constitutes criminal negligence by
educators, there is an even worse crime of which they are guilty: the students who do take physics are
indoctrinated with a fundamentally false view of science.
Hey-Ho, Hey-Ho Government Schools Have Got
To Go! Before 1852 compulsory education did not exist in America, yet in 1812 Pierre Dupont
published "Education in the United States", in which he stated that fewer than four out of every thousand
Americans could not read and do numbers well. Today, compulsory attendance in government schools is the
Rule (quite literally), while the failure of that system to educate children has been documented time and again.
"Teaching to the
test": Unfortunately, most of the people who call themselves educators have not been doing much
educating over the past few decades, as shown by American students repeatedly coming in at or near the bottom
on international tests.
"Teaching to the test", Part
II: Educational philosophies that have been put to the test in other countries —
Russia in the 1920s and China in the 1960s, for example — and which have failed miserably there, as
they are now failing here, continue in vogue because there are no consequences for failure here. Not so
long as teachers have iron-clad tenure and get paid by seniority rather than results.
"Teaching to the test", Part
III: In the case of the dominant educational fads of our times, many have been tried out before
in other countries. Their failures there should have warned us that they were likely to fail here
as well.
Dumbing
Us Down : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling: This radical treatise on public
education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years of award-winning
teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental
schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine.
Educational censorship: bland leading
the bland: "Sensitivity" censorship is a huge industry in the world of education. Textbook
publishers and testmakers hire people to draw up sensitivity guidelines. In school systems there are more
people who apply guidelines, and still more who review and argue about the censorship process. Reviewers
debated whether to censor a reference to Mount Rushmore, since Lakota Indians believe the monument intrudes on
their sacred ground. "Adopt-a-highway" litter control programs are controversial, too. They may
offend adopted children.
The "Fix" That's Destroying Education In
America: Without a strong basic education, today's children are mere pawns in the hands of those
who have a far different world in mind than the one in which the first generations of Americans set the nation
on its path to high achievement.
The hidden war on academic
achievement: The purpose of the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act seemed clear
enough to the sponsors — Congress merely sought to bar public schools from releasing students'
academic records to third parties without parental consent. At least, that's what the congressmen
thought their bill was for. But that was before the trial lawyers got involved.
The Death of Math in America: The
shuttle leaves the earth because an extraordinary amount of mathematics and physics permitted its engineers and
other technicians to create this marvel of modern science. More math was required for its scientific
payload. Today, in America, we have to import foreigners who possess these skills because our national
educational system has been under attack for over forty years, resulting in generations of Americans who cannot
perform the most basic skills.
For public education -- America is
history: Unfortunately, young Americans are oblivious to their heritage. Ignorance of our
past has been carefully cultivated by the educational establishment. The result is a cut-flower generation,
severed from its roots. The recently released survey of the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(known as the nation's report card) shows nearly 60 percent of high-school seniors lack even a basic
knowledge of U.S. history.
Masters of Their Own
Souls: an interview with John Taylor Gatto.
The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud:
"Gifted and talented" programs are simply more intensive indoctrination courses, not real academics.
California to Punish Excellence: University
of California Regents recently voted to change their admissions criteria.
Illiterate
America: Alan Caruba is frightened by how dumb graduates are today. Judging by the numbers,
people are plenty dumb. "About 40 percent of college grads take no courses in English or American
literature and nearly 31 percent have never taken a math course. More than 56 percent can't
calculate the change from $3 after buying a bowl of soup for 60 cents and a sandwich for $1.95.
Many cannot read and understand a simple set of directions." The article referenced "Beer and Circus", a
book by English professor Murray Sperber of Indiana University. The book contends that "college kids are
being fed a junk diet of alcohol, spectator sports and partying."
After 15 Years, Nation Is Still at
Risk: The indicators of educational inadequacy are manifold. While more high school
students today are enrolled in challenging academic courses, overall student achievement is essentially
unchanged from 1983 levels. Although college attendance is up, college remediation rates have soared,
and 30 percent of incoming college freshmen require remedial courses in reading, writing,
and mathematics.
Standardized Tests Reveal Grading Gap.
Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Undergraduate Admissions
Across the Nation: Racial and ethnic preferences play a far more important role in admissions
than has been previously acknowledged. Blacks have far greater probabilities of admission than do
similarly qualified whites at a large variety of schools, Hispanics have substantially greater probabilities
of admission than do whites, and Asians have similar probabilities of admissions. All of these
conclusions take into account both test scores and grades.
Compulsory Government Education, By What
Standard? Unlike public school teachers, I don't blame the parents for the failure of the
schools. I blame the teachers who taught the parents. The government schools are a complete and
utter failure. They should be closed.
Public Schools:
Turning Children and Parents into Peons. Public education is the most expensive "gift" that most
Americans will ever receive. Government school systems are increasingly coercive and abusive toward both
parents and students. While politicians speak grandly of the supposed benefits of public education,
government courts have ensured that parents and children have no legal rights to a decent education.
An Unbiased Eye for Education: Equality of
opportunity is what black America demands, not the false achievement of mandated equality of outcome.
National Testing: Blueprint for
Disaster: There is an ominous parallel between federal control of the welfare system and the
Clinton administration's attempt to nationalize American education through national testing. The national
dialogue on rigorous, challenging standards has just begun. National testing, however, may effectively
close the door on this dialogue: National testing is a back-door attempt to impose national
standards. What sorts of standards might result? It is unlikely that they would be based on
rigorous and challenging content, as are the award-winning standards in Virginia. Far more likely,
nationally imposed standards would be dumbed down versions of political correctness.
Why dumb Americans are the
best: American education might be deemed a remarkable success... if you're a politician.
Walter Williams says, "[Politicians] prefer ignorant, uninformed and emotional clients and constituents."
Now I Know My ABC's:
Sixty-three percent of black fourth-graders are illiterate. Someone besides Bill O'Reilly ought
to be pounding the table over this remarkable and frightening statistic.
Dumb and dumber:
An invitation to a dialogue on America's intellectual capacity. Back in the 1950s, the popular
television show The $64,000 Question once showed a contestant six paintings and asked not only
the artist and subject but also the name of the teacher with whom the artist studied. As Professor
Robert Thompson of Syracuse puts it, "In the '50s game shows, you had to know the exact answer.
Today we get multiple choice on a show whose title isn't even punctuated correctly." Any doubt which
direction we are moving?
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