Posted on 10/03/2009 4:49:44 PM PDT by Graybeard58
The official government data about literacy in America are dreadful: 32 million adults can't read printed material more challenging than a children's picture book; another 18 million are walking around with high school diplomas, but can't read above the sixth-grade level and have considerable difficulty making simple two-step calculations. Together, these groups comprise about 25 percent of the adult population.
America has so many illiterates and near illiterates, and their number grows by more than 2 million every year, because 3 in 10 students never finish high school and 1 in 4 graduates come away with the equivalent of an eighth-grade education or less. Illiteracy affects every aspect of one's life and is a reliable predictor of poverty, crime and myriad other social problems.
There's plenty of blame to go around here, starting with derelict parenting, the explosion of divorce, cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births, and the rise of a popular culture that glorifies and removes stigmas from anti-social behavior. These and other influences make the jobs of "educators" more difficult, but it hardly excuses their malfeasance as expressed in the literacy statistics.
At the core is the government's educational monopoly, with its desperate lack of accountability and enforceable standards, and the sway liberalism and unionism hold over it. Since 1960, per-pupil spending on public schools has more than tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars, but the quality of education has diminished.
All this money pursued untested fads, and expanded schools' duties to include psychology, day care for the children of teenage mothers and a raft of other social work that distracted schools from their core mission. But mostly, the money made unionized employees wealthier and more comfortable by lightening their workload through small class sizes and other means.
Over time, schools became less focused on imparting knowledge than indoctrinating students. Their emphasis went from reading, writing and arithmetic to interdisciplinary instruction in political correctness, multiculturalism and environmentalism. Once conveyors of knowledge, teachers became passive "facilitators of learning" who strove to be students' buddies rather than role models or authority figures. Today, America's schools spend something north of $100,000 on each student from kindergarten on, and for its investment, society gets millions of illiterate dropouts and near-illiterate graduates who are intellectually unprepared for the rigors of adulthood and civic participation.
Among the products of public education are the "educators" themselves. And as economist and Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell is fond of saying: "So long as public school teachers and administrators are drawn primarily from the bottom layers of college students, so long as they have iron-clad tenure, so long as their pay is wholly divorced from performance, and so long as they have a monopoly of the vast majority of students, everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." Indeed, as academic performance in America further lags the rest of the world, the educational establishment pushes back against even the mildest reforms. Its solution to everything is more: more money, more dues-paying personnel, more time, more slack, more excuses.
It's bad enough schoolchildren are cast into this caldron of failure for 180-plus days a year. Now President Obama would reward the educational monopoly for decades of malfeasance by turning schoolchildren over to it year round, as if its failed practices miraculously would succeed if given more time. Oh, yes, and more money. Lots and lots of money.
That said, if this proposal turns out to be anything more than the administration's attempt to distract the public from Afghanistan, Obamacare and mounting joblessness, and the Annie Le homicide, the 19-pound baby and the latest celebrity gossip, it will be interesting to see how many dedicated "educators" would flee the profession if they had to work summers.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
So whose fault is it? I assume it would be the teachers fault, or the people who force teachers to teach kids crap .... mmm, mmmmm, mm
Idiot schoolteachers have a lot to do with it, problems keeping order in schools also does.
It certainly will work for its intended purpose. That of further removing children from the influence of their parents and providing opportunities to indoctrinate.
1) End the wars
2) Cap and trade
3) Socialized medicine
4) Expand education (usually presented as expanding it backwards to age 3 and forwards through college...this latest proposal is akin to his campaign plank).
It's very possible he will FAIL on all 4.
He's a big fat zilch.
It is the fault of liberalism and by extension, all those, including me, who have allowed liberals to run our educational system.
yep, me too ... not reading the bills, not paying attention has consequences.
I used to think it was the teachers fault too..and it partially is, however..I believe the schools went under federal control in the 70s..and thats when the kids began to come out of school, unable to read. I believe before than, the schools were under state control.
Making a longer school day, or school session will not make kids smarter. If they arent “getting it” now..more hours wont help AND..do they intend to make the days longer..and keep the amount of homework some of these kids get?
Do they realize that some children in rural areas are riding the bus for over an hour before they get home? I have grandchildren that dont get home from school, in winter, until its dark outside.
They need to find out exactly WHY these kids arent learning and fix that! They USED to be able to learn. And kids havent changed all that much.
School has become a babysitting service ...
We switched my twin daughters to a new private school this year.
It’s been interesting the difference. Last year, they were in a school that gave tons of homework. All it did was make them stressed out, and I don’t think they really learned all that much.
This year, they don’t have as much homework. When something is difficult, they have time to actually understand the problem and work on it. Also, they have time to pursue other interests (acting, playing the flute, and reading). I’m already seeing a lot of academic growth in my daughters, and they are much happier.
One of the reasons why they have less homework in the new school is because they have less classes. They have 7 classes (english, math, science, history, pe, bible, and an elective) that meet 4 days a week for 55 minutes.
The old school had 11 classes that met for 40 minutes each. Besides the academic classes (reading, literature, math, science, history) they had art, bible, spanish, study skills, elective, and pe. They would meet for a short time, and then send home lots of work. My daughters said they didn’t actually do much work at school. I think they also spent a lot of time just switching classes.
Anyway, I think the new school is more effecient and they get a lot of academic work done at school.
Sometimes, more school doesn’t always mean a better education. I also think it’s good for kids to have time to pursue their own interests and to have time with their family.
The same folks who propagate their “Survival of the species” garbage would never surrender their stakes at the gold mine of tax dollar funded full employment for incompetents.
That does not stop them from voting though.
More school isn’t the answer, private schools are. Pick a good one and do what you have to do, like we did, to send your kids to private school.
I suggest the the courts. Think about what effect their decisions since the 1960s have done to the schools. Their meddling knows no bounds.
Not enough money pumped into education on a federal level via taxation and too much parental freedom to raise their kids the way they deem necessary.
There's too much Constitution talk going on.
We need to change that and get back to liberal control via superficial freedom talk.
We need Fascism to set things right.
"Living/breathing" is the answer.
Then people need to be fired. They have to get rid of this tenure thing. What other profession has that?
Go back to how school was taught 50 years ago. Get the damn computers out of the primary grades....
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