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.
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