Five years after I graduated from high school in 1960 the immigration policy in America was radically altered by the Hart-Cellar immigration act of 1965 which opened the floodgates to immigrants which utterly altered the character and culture of the United States. Succeeding "reforms" notably done to us by Teddy Kennedy in 1985 accelerated the process changing not only our culture but our color. Not incidentally, alteration and increases in legal immigration were accompanied by accelerating increases in the count of illegal immigrants. All of these millions and millions of immigrant children were inserted into our education system.
Of equal importance to the nature the educational experience in America was a new demographic element initiated in 1954 by the decision of the Supreme Court in Board of Education vs. Topeka Kansas requiring the integration of American schools, "with all deliberate speed." Over the course of the ensuing decades the educational system took on black children with very mixed results and much resistance from white suburban parents in places like Boston.
If the Supreme Court's decision represented a fulfillment of the promise of the Declaration of Independence and an overdue reaffirmation of the goals of the Civil War, it also brought with it a leftist mentality associated with the civil rights movement which regarded merit as a code word or dog whistle for discrimination. This was true in hiring for employment and, of course, true for education. If the left seeks "equality" in income, housing, employment, union benefits, and regards merit as the enemy of that goal, it will naturally oppose a merit-based system in education.
If discrimination based on merit in any statistical respect parallels discrimination associated with skin color or national origin, the left will oppose it even though no causal connection can be demonstrated. We see the same phenomenon today in the oversight of local police forces by our leftist Attorneys General.
We have seen from K through postgraduate university levels the phenomenon of grade inflation. We have seen our undergraduate colleges resort to remedial tutoring because the high schools have failed to produce literate candidates for college. Our high schools are passing failing children on to the next level in order to secure federal monies. Inflation is not limited, unfortunately, to grading but extends to tuition costs as the interference by the federal and state governments has inevitably detached our universities from a system of supply and demand and turned them into subsidized industries like solar power. Not surprisingly, the process has politicized our educational system even as it has debased it.
John Dewey and The Frankfurt School have succeeded in taking the American educational system hostage to their worldview which requires equality and abhors merit. This process is inherent in the soul of an educator but it has been accelerated by politics and the politics of immigration and integration. The aphorism, culture trumps politics, is true and tells us that the remedy for a failed educational system comes from a culture but it is the job of of education to shape that culture.
Therein lies our dilemma.
