Posted on 04/08/2008 4:18:17 AM PDT by Amelia
Twenty-five years ago, the federal government report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" launched an era of efforts to improve public schools that continues today.
...the report fueled new interest in education reform, launched the standards movement and influenced the Bush administration's creation of the No Child Left Behind law.
Here are some key events related to school reform since "A Nation at Risk" was published...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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They blew it. And a few generations get to pay the price. Boy, do I feel "engineered."
In 2001 G W Bush and Ted Kennedy teamed up 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.”.
Some folks believe, and it's actually been quite well documented, that the Federal gubmint intentionally dumbed down the population.
Check out The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.
This book uses gubmint documents obtained through the FOIA, along with news stories that, in many cases were run once, then disappeared from public view, to show this gubmint policy goes back at least as far as FDR.....and maybe farther......
1995: David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle publish "The Manufactured Crisis," which questions the data used in "A Nation at Risk" and says legislators used bad information to enact bad reforms. The still-influential book said the 1983 report characterized the quality of public education as far worse than it was. Other critics say the report focused too heavily on high schools.
We still believe the overall quality is terrible, although some analysts say it's mainly terrible in inner cities...
NCLB is really starting to get on a lot of nerves for a good many people. I would hope that before long they scrap this law.
I would like to see this law go the way of the Assault Weapons Ban.
The natural high school graduation rate (mastery of twelfth grade history, literature, English composition, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, biology, chemistry, physics, and a foreign language) among whites is probably no more than 50%.
A system which premises spending on the theory that, absent malpractice and with adequate expediture, this rate should be 100% leads to three things:
1) Dilution of the curriculum,
2) Falsification of test results, and 3) Warehousing of large, sullen adolescent populations who should be working or serving in the military.
It's time to scrap public high school and to start over.
Sysiphus' effort wasn't terrible, and neither is that of inner city public school teachers.
What they are trying to do is impossible, and they should stop.
hmmm. Not sure how I should take this.
I guess I'm too dumb to believe conspiracy theories prima facie.
I actually work with people, college educated people, [otherwise] intelligent people, who will tell me with a straight face that 9/11 was "an inside job" and then list a litany of "proofs" that is interrupted only by my leaving the cubicle.
If the government actually made a conscious effort to ‘dumb down’ the population via the educational system, we would all be geniuses.
Check out the book I spoke about. It's a real eye opener. Her arguments are fully supported by gubmint documents going back to the 1930's, released through the FOIA, along with supporting news stories. I'm no conspiracy theorist, either. I'm a product of gubmint skools and do hold two advanced engineering degrees. However, I'm stunned at the number of functionally illiterate people I encounter almost every single day, most of which are 10-15 years younger than I. By my observation, the level of education I'm seeing coming out of publik skools in my area has dropped dramatically since I graduated high school in 1981. (and no, I don't think 9/11 was an inside job)......
It's also unrealistic to expect that a majority of students could or should go on to college, IMO.
I *had* hoped that NCLB would encourage schools to focus more on diagnosis and remediation of learning difficulties in the lower grades, but that seems to have been somewhat unrealistic as well....
I saw some of her videos way back.
you may be on to something there.
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