Posted on 11/26/2001 10:42:57 PM PST by JohnHuang2
It was in 1983 that members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a brutally honest report entitled "A Nation at Risk." The members of the commission wrote, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war."
The report was obviously calculated to awaken a stuporous public to a national disaster. It didn't work. Neither have any of the hundreds of other reports and studies issued since then giving the same message.
We now have in hand a new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as "The Nation's Report Card." NAEP measured the scientific knowledge of students in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades across the nation. They used three scoring levels: basic, proficient and advanced.
Having previously reported that our children are doing poorly on reading and math, NAEP currently reports that, for the United States as a whole, only three in 10 students are proficient in science at their grade level. The proportion that scored below the minimum basic level rose to almost 50 percent.
If one digs into the full report, some interesting truths emerge. For example, the everlasting gap between the achievement of blacks and Hispanics and their white classmates actually closed slightly at the 12th grade level. Alas, this was not because blacks and Hispanics improved, but because whites did worse. As an added embarrassment to the education industry, this entire decline in 12th grade science achievement took place in public schools. Twelfth grade scores in private schools rose sharply.
The overall results included scores from private schools, the three largest of which are religious schools: Catholic, Lutheran and Conservative Christian. Whites, blacks and Hispanics in these schools did significantly better at all educational stages than did their counterparts in government schools. This means, of course, that national scores would be even lower if these private schools were omitted from total results.
Based on other objective assessments, if home-schooled students had been included, the superiority of private education over "public" education would be even more striking. That is why teachers and politicians, more so than average folks, send their kids to private schools.
California came in dead last among the states. Democrat Governor Gray Davis, who claims that education is his top priority, was not discouraged by the results, said his spokeswoman, Hilary McLean.
One wonders what is his threshold of discouragement, given that year after ruinous year in the Golden State, hundreds of thousands of minority children languish in poor, unsafe, drug-infested, mind-wasting ghetto schools, held captive there by dirty politics and the governor's own incestuous relationship with old-fashioned, big-time, heavy-handed labor unions representing teachers.
To one extent or another, California's problem is the nation's problem. William McGurn, The Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer, explained it this way: "This integration of the NEA [National Education Association] into the Democratic Party goes a long way toward explaining how a monopoly that today leaves nearly two-thirds of African-American and Hispanic fourth-graders illiterate, has insulated itself against political accountability."
Education union leaders are open about their mission to get more money for teachers and protect them from the consequences of incompetence as individuals and from accountability as a profession. As one union leader boasted, "as for the kids, they don't pay dues."
What most people, including many teachers, don't fully realize is that the NEA is a left-wing institution with an active agenda, involving support for homosexual causes, abortion, affirmative action, secular humanism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism and open borders. They have insinuated these causes into the teaching profession.
Hard to believe? Hear the words of Robert H. Chanin, NEA general counsel, as he responded to massive documentation assembled by the Landmark Legal Foundation, which supported a formal allegation that the NEA has illegally used millions of dollars of tax exempt union dues on partisan political activities, in full coordination with the Democrat National Committee.
In a brash and revealing speech to the National Council of State Education Associations, Chanin said: "Someone really is after us ... [the NEA and its affiliates] have been singled out because of our political power and effectiveness at all levels – because we have the ability to help implement the type of liberal social and economic agenda that [they] find unacceptable."
In the simplest of terms, the quid pro quo deal is this: In exchange for NEA money and votes, Democrat politicians will not allow consequential school reforms to take place. Only an informed and outraged people can change this.
Ahh, yes. I remember that line. It was from the late Al Shankar, union prez, and I believe the full quote was, "We'll start representing the children's interests when they start paying dues." Something like that.
Take it from one who wasted three years trying to reform one little elementary schol, it's not just the NEA and Democrats -- its also the average, run of the mill parent who stands in the way of better schools! To my horror and chagrin, I found that most parents of any political stripe would rather rationalize their good feelings about their child's school than take the real effort of going to meetings, researching and finding out the truth about public schools today. Inflated grades and feel good "Blue Ribbon" school awards do it for them. They ask nothing more of their schools than this. If they did, they would have to expend effort themselves to make something happen. Anyway, what does it cost them? Colleges today are going along with the program and lowering standards and even employers have to adjust their standards downwards -- or get Congress to let them bring in brighter foreign workers.
I have given up on school reform from within. The only thing that forces schools to change is competition. Parents who wouldn't take the trouble to check out schools themselves will follow those parents who do know a good school from a bad one. Once they have the ability to change their school, they no longer have an excuse for leaving their child in a bad school. Nothing is a better motivator than the feeling that little John down the street is going to a better school than your own child because his parents went to the trouble to get him in. Parent "peer pressure" then does its miraculous works to bring about accountability.
But the real opportunity of change without the requirement of superhuman effort has to be there. For this reason, vouchers may be the only reform that has a chance to significantly improve school performance and accountability. Personally, my ideal reform would be to take away the responsibility for education from the state and give it back to parents (along with their tax money) and the private sector. This would encourage more private sector schools (which I would imagine would be largely religious) and other imaginative -- we could even use the word "DIVERSE" -- approaches to education. It is amazing how education is the one human endeavor in which liberals think diversity is bad! There would, of course, have to be some safety net education program in the public sector if private initiatives did not step up to the plate to take care of everyone. This reform would be a great step toward recovering the competence of the citizenry to govern itself and would solve the problem of the role of faith in schools.
Schools back then taught the "three R s" and not much else. If we measure schools today by those standards then it looks as if they do a pretty good job.
Main Entry: 1war
Pronunciation: 'wor
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English werre, from Old North French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German werra strife; akin to Old High German werran to confuse
Date: 12th century
...1 a (1) : a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism b : a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end <a class war>
It was an act of war. It was an a secret war successfully overwhelming the American public by appealing to their emotions while simultaneously mouthing all the "correct" platitudes. It was carefully planned and waged by corrupt politicians, judges, unions, academics, major media and other Liberals. You know; the ones who are still in power!
This report was also written in 1983, so the country can't say 'we were never warned'. Just imagine how much worse the problem is today than it was then?
The marvel is, somehow America has survived (albeit tenuously) for as long as it has. But the big questions are, can America ever recover and what will it take to turn the situation around before the grievous wounds are fatal?
Not just the NEA but the WHOLE Department of Education.
Remember Reagan's promises?
Public Education has proven to be a failure.
Major BUMPS to those responsible parents who choose to not allow the government to raise their children.
It might be too late for what ikanakattara is advocating. This is a "democracy" ha, excuse me, and the majority rules. If the Mexican population exceeds the anglo in the schools they should all be taught in Spanish.. Remember we do NOT have a national language.....
So many people think that since their local public school is better than some other public school, it's their duty to support the public schools, regardless of the damage to their children and others.
The NEA/AFT dictates the agenda at every public school in the country, including charter schools. They allow enough variation on the theme to sucker parents and taxpayers into "keeping the faith", they'll even pretend to split their teachers union, to give teachers the impression that there are alternatives.
The only viable alternatives are (1) homeschooling and (2) private schools which hire teachers who know and can teach their subject material without injecting socialist (or other) indoctrination.
Unless the voters/taxpayers can remove all the liberals from all public colleges and public schools, there is no hope for reform. Since there is little chance of that happening, every effort should be made to vote away every taxpayer source of their funding.
After all is said and done, it all boils down to this:
The teachers pretend to teach,
the children pretend to learn,
and the parents pretend that
the teachers are teaching
and the children are learning.
The nature of the ‘debate’ I've heard there and elsewhere can be likened to a situation where we’re showing kids porn films and merely arguing over the size of the next theater that we’re going fund and build.
It’s all meaningless unless we address what is taught and how it is taught…
Bookmarked to read and study again later.
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