Posted on 04/26/2008 3:22:42 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Today marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the influential Reagan-era report by a blue-ribbon panel that alerted Americans to the weak performance of our education system. The report warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." That dire forecast set off a quarter century of education reform that's yielded worthy changes – yet still not the achievement gains we need to turn back the tide of mediocrity.
...We're also far more open to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools, home schooling. And we no longer suppose kids must attend the campus nearest home. A majority of U.S. students now study either in bona fide "schools of choice," or in neighborhood schools their parents chose with a realtor's help.
Those are historic changes indeed – most of today's education debates deal with the complexities of carrying them out. Yet our school results haven't appreciably improved, whether one looks at test scores or graduation rates. Sure, there are up and down blips in the data, but no big and lasting changes in performance, even though we're also spending tons more money. (In constant dollars, per-pupil spending in 1983 was 56% of today's.)
And just as "A Nation at Risk" warned, other countries are beginning to eat our education lunch. While our outcomes remain flat, theirs rise. Half a dozen nations now surpass our high-school and college graduation rates. International tests find young Americans scoring in the middle of the pack.
What to do now? It's no time to ease the push for a major K-12 education make-over – or to settle (as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently would) for reviving yesterday's faith in still more spending and greater trust in educators. But we can distill four key lessons
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
As usual even the four solutions smack of the usual pretentious educational prose and promises that never seem to lead anywhere but down.
A good place to start is recognizing the abilities and liabilities of the students. Only about 20% of the general population are truly college material on the basis of their innate intellectual ability. Yet, we seem to believe we can succeed by sending 40-60% to college. The assumption being, it is an educational laying on of hands will transform lesser ability students into software engineers,lawyers, doctors and other prestigious occupations. And if you can't do that then you need some version of affirmative action.
Marx triumphed. Radical egalitarianism regardless of underlying biological attributes is now the mainstay of the American educational establishment. What is amazing is that many able students, backed by their parents, do make it through the educational bureaucracy and succeed at life's challenges.
Well put!
Ideally, we should focus more attention on vocational training for the majority who should not go to college. That way, they learn a trade. After graduation, companies could hire them and put them in an apprenticeship program where they can hone their craft and eventually branch out on their own if they desire. For too many, college is just a one or two year vacation from the realities and responsibilities of life, much of it subsidized by those of us paying taxes.
How about stop wasting time teaching about Heather has two mommies and the world is going to end because of global warming among a few zillion other things that do nothing to further one’s useful education.
If you have any means by which to protect your children from the pubic schools, do whatever it takes!
No sacrifice is too great to keep your kids from such wasteful secularist proganda communes.
You are right. It really is child abuse if you have other options.
A question to those whose kids are in pubic schools:
What is preventing you from protecting your children from such a corrupt and failed system?
I would think most people could figure out a way to do it.
Many would much rather drive a Navigator SUV than spend $5-7K per year on their child’s private education. Not all private education cost $12-20K per year. It can be affordable, though it might require some sacrifice.
We homeschool 6 for 2500/year.
We save lots of mom’s taxi service gas.
We save lots of money for school clothes.
We save lots of money for lunches.
We save lots of money wasted on convenience food and other purchase made due to mom always running full speed with no break.
We “sacrifice” an extra income that would all be spent on having the appearance of a better lifestyle.
We enjoy the benefit of knowing who are kids are and what they do all day and what makes them tick.
We enjoy a home with a true heart always present to love and share.
...our kids...
That’s $2500 for all 6.
That is great! God bless your family.
The report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”
See also “Obama”, “Michael Moore”, “Global Warming”...
The rising tide of mediocrity is evident everywhere you look, especially in the larger metro areas.
No Navigator here - we got the basic Suburban, which will seat all 9 of us (only the base models offer 9 seats). But the base model is awfully nice (I was surprised).
The oldest is in a private high school.
Back at you.
True. I do realize some simply are struggling to put macaroni and cheese on the table and have no options right now, but most people have their kids in pubic schools by apathy or by choice. And the heavy odds are that they will have occasion to be very disappointed in both the short and long term effect of exposure to such corrupt institutions.
So, if the D.C. public schools were, say, an auto factory, only half the cars started to be built, get made. So if at any one moment in time, you took the total budget and divided it by the number of cars under construction, you would get $20K per car, but if you did it by completed cars since half will never be finished and road worthy, it is $40,000 per car(student) per year.
It gets worse, though.
Those students who do graduate with that august degree from the system, only half go on to higher education. So, if you wanted to say what is the cost in dollars to get a D.C. kid into college, you could come up with a figure of around $80,000 per student per year.
It gets worse.
Only about half the kids that do go to any college, only about half stay more than a year. That would produce a figure of $160,000 per student per year to produce a kid that could exist more than a year post high school.
Public opinion polls during presidential election years always show education as one of the highest ranking concerns of American voters. So it is not surprising that presidential candidates of both major parties always spend a great deal of time talking about their deep commitment to the education of “our nation’s children.”
This commitment always involves a promise to increase federal spending on public – actually, government — education, and also to fight for systemic changes to give us improved school accountability, smaller classes, more teachers, more funding for infrastructure, and so on.
All of this new spending and systemic change is necessary, we are told each year, because our schools are in crisis. Thus, we have GW Bush and Ted Kennedy teaming up in 2001 to fix public education by giving us “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk, which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see what the future holds if this trend is allowed to continue – more money thrown at ever larger failures, year after year after year. Has there ever been a year in which the federal government has spent less money on education than the year before? Of course not. Has there ever been a year in which America has been able to declare that it has the best educated population in the world? Not that I’ve ever heard.
One nice thing about the free market is that when a business continuously delivers shoddy products to its customers at inflated prices, the customers eventually stop buying and the business is forced to stop wasting resources and shut its doors. Not so with federal programs. If a federal program – such as public education — fails miserably at its stated purpose, then all the special interests and social engineering bureaucrats start screaming that the failure is due to a lack of funding.
Thus, the worse the performance, the more money these people get. Talk about a perverse incentive. Naturally, those who would argue that maybe it is time to stop throwing good money after bad, and that maybe it is time to get the federal government out of the education business altogether, will be greeted with horrified accusations they don’t care about the education of “our nation’s children.”.
Amen to that!! Another problem with our public schools is that we have too many people there who do not want or deserve to be. An education is an honor, a privilege, and an opportunity to be seized with both hands. We have too many classrooms today that are nothing more than a free babysitting service for parents.
For a lot of people the simple answer is money.
“We have too many classrooms today that are nothing more than a free babysitting service for parents.”
Spot on! Ever hear how angry some of these parents get when there is a Teacher-Parent Conference Day and they have to actually parent their children for the day?
I have a very good friend who teaches. One of her duties is afternoon car duty, where she makes sure the kids get safely to their cars and she sits with them as they wait for their rides. She said it never fails, on Fridays or the day before holidays the parents will be on average an hour late picking up the kids.
“on Fridays...the parents will be on average an hour late picking up the kids.”
Well, of course, Happy Hour doesn’t get over until 7:00. :(
Twenty-Five Years Later, A Nation Still at Risk (Education)...
public education is pissing money down a rat hole.....
try having the NEA teach basics and stop worrying about how children feel....forget affirmative action...after all....MLK wanted children to be judged by the character of their content...not color quotas...kick out and put into the military all that won’t act civilized and avail themselves to learning.....stop rewarding students for mediocrity....it breeds nothing but lib/dems voting for more government....
and never forget.....get rid of the illegal parasites that have decimated the tax resources intended for LEGAL students in favor of these crap filled bi-lingual esl and all other placating programs that produce little if any results!!!!
Your analysis...spot on! I agree that it is clear that Mr Finn has lead the charge in the dumbing down of America, and the obfuscation of the cause: a sharp turn to the left in a (now) Marxist curriculum in public schools, textbook publishers, et al. Since he praises “A Nation at Risk” the obfuscation may have originated there....but clearly, no progress since...none whatsoever! NEA, successfully alienating students one student at a time!
1956
Brilliant post....Carter’s DOE MUST die, preferably while he’s still alive!
Of the 2 greatest of Carter’s legacy gifts to America....the Jihad, and the DOE, the DOE may have done the most damage!
I recently saw a picture of Harvard University President Drew Faust visiting Beijing’s “High School No. 3.” It appeared to be single sex (female), all dressed in neat uniforms. Maybe it was too regimented, too competitive, too disciplined. But it left me with the impression that these kids may be gaining on us.
Ping for later reading
Some schools are doing this, the little high school here is using their vocational agriculture program to get students started on the path to being welders, and diesel technicians- both careers pay fairly well too. The boy my daughter dated in high school went through the program at the school and then to a diesel tech. trade school and now has a great career that is in demand. I think this is happening more and more. My youngest daughter decided to go to a medical technical school instead of college, and she really likes it. The technical schools also help the students get jobs when they finish the program.
For a while I think people in education thought everyone needed to follow the traditional school path- and then off to college. I think reality has set in and some now realize that is not the path for everyone, I do see more going to trade schools after high school and some schools help them in that direction. Many community colleges are also offering programs that train for a career instead of a degree path.
It’s hard for the education system folks to understand that not every student wants to go to traditional college- or should.
“We seem to believe we can succeed by sending 40-60% to college”
The problem is that by dumbing down our schools, getting a college degree is now the equilivant of a high school diploma. All majors aside, one needs at least a masters to look educated in todays world.
Good analysis as to our higher education system turning into a puppy mill populated by students who do not the intellectual capabilities, nor the desire, to make it through college. The higher educational system, like any other good bureaucracy, wants inflated numbers that will be commensurate with inflated governmental aid. This is not being done for the betterment of the students but for the universities bottom line.
Wonder exactly what the percentage of students who enter four year universities actually graduate? If someone out there knows the answer to this please share it.
Lastly, I’d point to two things that have been an incredible drag and have contributed immensely to the dumbing down of our educational system besides Marxist rhetoric; those being illegal immigration and one parent households with multiple offspring from many “fathers.”
Well thought out post. Socrates via Plato had a similar idea when they structured society as to gold, silver and bronze. They allowed for movement up and down the typology but restricted ruling to the gold.
Thanks... I just wish some politicians would take note and then action.
And we still want to amnesty 20,000,000 very poorly educated illegal aliens just to add to our problem. Yep, pouring gasoline on a fire only makes sense to kooks, liars and politicians.
We need to relearn some respect for skilled tradesmen, many of whom earn more money than some college graduates. We have a huge need for mechanics, electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters etc. I remember the slogan I was taught in the Navy, “It takes every man on this damned ship to get underway”. There was little room for elitist attitudes on an aircraft carrier.
getting a college degree is now the equilivant of a high school diploma.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In too many cases a four year degree fails to even equal what should be a high school education. I have spoken to too many college graduates who could not answer simple questions about topics I had to learn in grade school, not to even mention high school. We are producing people with undergraduate university degrees who don’t know the first thing about the history of this country. Some cannot name the correct century for the civil war.
...as did our founding fathers, restricting ‘voting’ to property owners. Methinks they had something there!
Thanks... Feel free to forward to your congressmen and state legislators.
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