Choices Not Echoes

Campus Report ^ | January 28, 2008 | Louisa Tavlas

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Choices Not Echoes

by: Louisa Tavlas, January 28, 2008

...It may not be news to some us that, academically, American students lag behind many of their international counterparts. And it may not come to as a surprise that, despite this, the U.S. is an extravagant spender on education, having the highest per student cost in the industrial world.

But a series of statistics that Walberg reveals in his introduction are even more disconcerting. For example, he notes that reading achievement of 12th graders has steadily declined from 1992 to 2007. The 2006 American College Test indicated that only 51 percent of U.S. students meet basic college reading requirements.

Graduation rates are equally bleak. Only 68 percent of 9th graders graduate high school on time, and of that number, a mere 40 percent enroll directly into college. Due to poor preparation in high school (illustrated by the above ACT scores) fewer than 4 in 10 college students finish in 4 years, and only 6 in 10 complete college in 6 years. In a final wince-inducing statistic, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy cited that, in 2006, a meager 31 percent of college-educated Americans qualify as “prose-literate.” The definition of prose literacy? It is the ability to fully comprehend something as simple as a newspaper story...

If Walberg expects a typical teacher to single-handedly whip these students into shape, then he places too much faith in the Hollywood-tailored professor who, out of sheer charisma, can coax inner-city children to morph from disrespectful, apathetic, and drug-addled youths into poetry-spewing and competitive-dancing phenomena.

While the scenario of the apathetic child, misguided parent, and martyr educator is not necessarily the norm, it suffices to say that Walberg’s Horace example is not the norm either. Still, Walberg makes convincing arguments for the necessity of school choice...