Posted on 12/08/2024 6:18:12 AM PST by Rev M. Bresciani
American schoolchildren’s math and reading scores saw “a marked decline” — again — falling further behind their own scores before the COVID-era lockdowns, trailing even more foreign nations, and fueling calls for President-elect Donald Trump to reform or abolish the Department of Education.
American students participate in two international tests — the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) — at ages nine and 13. American fourth graders scored 18 points lower in the 2022-2023 school year than in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic closures. Eighth graders’ scores fell by 27 points over the same period.
(Excerpt) Read more at new.americanprophet.org ...
Then it levelled off, but at a rather high level.
Then the Department of Education came in as a payoff to the teacher's unions, and literacy has been going down ever since.
That does not absolutely prove the Department of Education caused the drop in literacy, but it does prove they are useless at best.
And every state has district BOEs...another crap load of money. Why? There are only 245,000 students in our state, yet there are 55 school boards answering the state BOE. It’s a waste of money based on the current outcomes.
Good. Kill it.
I read that the high water mark for test scores in the United States was 1964.
The solution is simple: Go back and put in place what was used in 1964.
Most significantly, a very simple measure of any bureaucracy’s effects upon education needs to be adopted, primarily at the local & state levels (perhaps to be aggregated at the federal level for statistics, but statistics ALONE).
Given present company, I really don’t need to elaborate.
But the resultant legal battles will be both long & enormous in consideration of the effects upon school systems - K-12 & higher ed - nationwide.
They need a strategy to deal with the teacher’s unions et al; I’m not sure how the magnitude of changes could possibly be accomplished in the face of all the litigation which would likely result...but I smile at the effects of simply shutting the valve on the federal teat of $$ by elimination of DOE.
Education is like the homeless crisis: Homelessness is mostly not about a lack of housing. Homelessness is all about drug addiction, mental illness and dysfunctional families.
Falling school test score are not about funding or class size. The problems with education have much to do with deteriorating and dysfunctional families, missing fathers, dysfunctional neighborhoods and radical left wing policies.
If we eliminate the Dept of Education there is at least a chance that local control will help the schools while the taxpayers save billions of dollars.
“I have sometimes posed the rhetorical question, as to whether the state of public education has improved , since we created a Department of Education.”
If you knew the people who inhabit the US Department of Education, you’d know that are the SAME PEOPLE who were out in the streets protesting Vietnam and then Reagan, and wanted an end to the US being top-dog (even if it meant losing the Cold War).
As to whether education has improved in the US - of course not, but that doesn’t mean that the people working at the Department of Education don’t consider their 50 year run successful, as they consider it a COMPLETE SUCCESS, because, back then, we were near the top in education...and now we’re at the bottom.
Mission Accomplished.
People who think teacher unions care about educating children must also believe the purpose of the UAW is to build great automobiles.
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