The federal government should get out of the education business.
As the nation's children return to elementary and secondary schools, it is increasingly essential that their parents and communities coast to coast realize how poorly served they are and how their learning environment is increasingly tainted by a socialist agenda.
Our nation's schools have long been factories of boredom, centers of academic incompetence. High school graduation rates have been in a fairly steady decline. At its peak in 1969, the rate was 77 percent. By 2007 it was 68.8 percent.
In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported, "New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S. high school students in the last few years."
What caught my eye was a quote from Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, who said that "if our kids aren't dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally."
The subject of education is important because our children are the generation to which the future of the nation must be entrusted. "A recent study found the U.S. ranks only 12th in the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 who hold college degrees."
The failure of our nation's schools, to my mind, coincides with the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, and which began operating on May 16, 1980.
The word "education" does not appear in the U.S. Constitution and, until the Department of Education came along, it was the responsibility of States and local communities. A government that has managed Conrail since 1976 without once making a profit should not have been trusted with the nation's educational system.
I opposed No Child Left Behind when former President Bush proposed it and, like former President Reagan, I have long believed the Department of Education should be ended and that responsibility be returned to the States and local communities. The DOE exists today as little more than an obstacle to learning in the classroom and a giant funding machine.
The DOE is pretty much owned by the National Education Association which is not an "association," but a powerful union, the largest with an estimated 3.2 members. The Democrat Party is heavily indebted to it for funds and campaign workers.
It is doubtful that most Americans know that, for the past several months, the NEA's website has recommended that its members read "Rules for Radicals" by the late Saul Alinsky, a dedicated communist. If NEA members adopt its political agenda, the enemy will literally be in our nation's classrooms.
It has not gone unnoticed that Obama's "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," otherwise known as the "Stimulus Act," enabled the education lobby to suck up billions more from taxpayers.
The Act allocated $5 billion to early learning programs, including the failed Head Start and Early Head Start, child care and programs for children with special needs. It also allocated $77 billion for "reforms" to allegedly strengthen elementary and secondary education, including $48.6 billion to "stabilize" state education budgets. It was a Full Employment Act for teachers and school administrators.
Apparently those billions were not enough because on August 11, President Obama signed a bill authorizing an additional $10 billion to states for education salaries. The Senate was so concerned the money might be spent for other purposes it included a provision that the money could not be used for anything else.
It apparently was not enough because in July the NEA president, Dennis Van Roekel, was calling for a complete overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, one that is entirely test-based without any notice of the fact that individual children learn at different rates. He didn't much like the Obama Race to the Top program, where schools compete for grants if they demonstrate any improvement in learning and graduation rates. Another $3.4 billion in grants is at yet unspent. Roekel didn't like the idea of competition.
Clearly, schools that are graduating students ill-prepared to go onto college and that continue to experience high dropout rates are doing something wrong. Putting kids into teach-to-the-test straight jackets is not working.
In a new book by Dr. Tim Elmore, Generation iY: Our Last Change to Save Their Future, the author who founded a non-profit organization, Growing Leaders, writes that, "I have spoken to employers who told me they will never hire another new graduate. I have heard teachers say they can hardly wait for retirement since they can't do a thing about kids today. I've had parents confide in me that they don't know what to do with their kids except scream at them."
Statistics published by UNESCO and the CIA reveal that, while American students spend twelve years in school, ranking them first out of a hundred, they rank fifteenth out of twenty-seven in terms of literacy. Their math and science scores are poor. They poll at 35%, fifth out of seventeen, for their dislike of school, and 61%, second out of seventeen, find school boring.
The schools are failing, the students are being cheated of the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become productive adults, and the U.S. government thinks that, if it just spends a few more billion dollars, this will change. It won't.
The federal government must get out of the education business, must devolve responsibility back to the states and local communities, and they in turn should refuse to deal with teachers unions in order to regain control over the education of the nation's most precious resource, its children.
“The failure of our nation’s schools, to my mind, coincides with the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979..”
I’d trace the failure to the mid ’60s when the NEA chose to legally change it’s status from a proffessional association to a labor union.
I agree that one of the biggest problems is the US Department of Education. The Department of Education provides funds to public school districts throughout the country. Their average contribution amounts to a little less than seven cents on each dollar expended. However; look at the amount of control the department demands in return for its 7% contribution. They, in cahoots with the NEA; which in my mind stands for the National Extortion Association, mandate what shall be taught, how it shall be taught, and which groups are favored with use of school facilities and which are excluded. They even involve the students in the unions’ political and social battles
Since the beginning of the Department of education in Washington there has been a 90%decrease in the number of school boards in this country. Placing ever larger volumes of children under the authority of ever shrinking numbers of school boards cannot help but to decrease the ability of those boards to focus on more individualized curriculum studies. It’s only common sense that a school board would enjoy more success making decisions for 1,500 students as opposed to 150,000.
Recently the Los Angeles Times did a story on the LA Unified School District. The newspaper took seven years worth of Math and English test scores. They then crunched the numbers to determine the effectiveness of the teachers. Afterward; they started naming names, not only of those like Miguel Aguilar, whose students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, but also John Smith’s pupils next door who have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar’s class but by the end of the year have fallen far behind.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story
Of course, you know what happened next. The teachers squealed like the stuck pigs they are
“National and local teachers unions sharply criticized The Times on Sunday when the newspaper published a database of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade city school teachers ranked by their effectiveness in raising student test scores.”
http://discussions.latimes.com/20/lanews/la-me-teacher-react-20100830/10
The education of our children is way to important to outsource to government bureaucrats and union shills. It’s way past time to end the reign of unions in education as well as the participation of Washington. Both the NEA and the DoE should be slated for extinction.
Another item that evades commentators of left or right is the curriculum in US public schools. It’s weak. The Race to the Top project of Obama purports to pay states to come up with better curricula. However teaching basics well, which the test scores referred to in the article above show are not taught well, is a low priority of the diversity, all will succeed crowd. Hard math, classics education, expertise in US and European History and talent in what were termed in my youth “vocational arts” are devalued by the school administrators. Its easy to dump on the NEA. But the elected local officials,not the feds, still basically determine what is taught in the schools and how. They control discipline within classrooms where ipods outnumbers turned in homework assignments. The locals pander to multicultural education, and abandon Latin and ancient History. Teacher colleges are not liberal arts schools, so many of the best teachers are grads of liberal arts programs who switch careers, or engineers/scientists who believe it or not sometimes teach high school because it’s a way to help our society at lower pay.
Conservatives need to stop beating the old scapegoats like unions. The enemy often is the parent or the popular school board member. Education can be fun, it shouldn’t always be fun. Pain is part of life.
Frankly, China may call itself a “socialist” nation, but their education system is closer to traditional Anglo-American education prior to 1960 than the current feel-good, everyone can succeed fraud. We should look to Asia for models as well as some former British colonies who actually do a better job of recreating the old British system that multicultural Britain abandoned to its long-term detriment.
“Another item that evades commentators of left or right is the curriculum in US public schools.” Agreed. It seems as if today, both curriculum and pace are geared to the slowest participant. Another difficulty is that we’ve recently come to the conclusion that all children should go to college. I’ll be showing my age here but when I was in High school only about 60% of us were on a college track: And a college preparatory track was a more difficult curriculum. Others were on a ‘trade’ track.
Another difficulty is the Department of Education. Before its inception there were @ 10 times as many local school boards as there are now. Those local boards had a much better idea of local challenges and could tailor the class size and curriculum. Not so much anymore.
There are some strong bottom line questions to be considered. In the mid 1970s I was a Community College Administrator. We started teaching high school courses as “remedial” in English and Math. Hmmm wonder why? Well as early as 1975 Johnny couldn’t read. But his self-esteem was very strong.
Go back to the past and watch the movie Blackboard Jungle to help you understand why our system went to Hell so fast. When the students control the class no one learns. The system died soon after the 1950s.
Is there a way to bring it back? Not in government operated schools running under a mandate to keep students enrolled until 16 no matter what. When Washington DC was recognized as one of the best school systems in the country they pushed a concept called tracking which grouped students of similar abilities allowing the class to move at relatively uniform speeds. OH, do I hear a criticism of lack of diversity or racism? Well there went tracking and the entire DC school system…their last and final shining moment.
Only the private schools have a chance and they are dictated to by government entities therefore their product is also suspect but at least most of their graduates can read and write and even compute. Their biggest benefit they can expel a student.
Home schoolers are the best way for a student to get an education today but government wants to kill that off.
Think of it an education system that can only create low level clerks…a politician’s dream.