School’s Out
By Callimachus | Related entries in Education, NewsThe New Editor rounds up just the tip of the iceberg of the failure of America’s woeful public school systems to actually educate. And it’s one iceberg that isn’t shrinking:
- A survey by ACT college testing service found “only 51 percent of students showed they were ready to handle the reading requirements of a typical first-year college course.”
- Some students thought “the right to drive and the right to have pets” are listed in the Constitution.
- Another survey showed that “more than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.” The results, the study found, “cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.”
- AP reported that “almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year [college] degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station.”
- “Most Chicago Public Schools alumni must take remedial classes at the Chicago City Colleges; 74 percent must take remedial English; 94 percent must take remedial math.”
Stupid kids become stupid adults. We live in a nation now where 20% of those surveyed believe that the sun revolves around the earth and only 55% can name all three branches of the federal government.
Some of this, I have to think, is meant to be a whack on the head rather than scientific inquiry. Like the survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum which found that “most Americans have an easier time naming members of the cartoon Simpson family than listing the five freedoms granted by the nation’s founders.” Well, you phrase the question that way because you want to get the jaw-dropping answer. On the other hand, the confidence of the surveyors, even before the survey is given, that the kids will give the desired, embarrassing, answer is itself evidence of a problem.
So if they’re not learning how to read and write, what are our kids learning?
[T]here is the story from Parsippany (NJ) High School, where, according to The Daily Record (NJ), a teacher has one of his classes putting President Bush on trial for “‘crimes against civilian populations’ and ‘inhumane treatment of prisoners,’ with students arguing both sides before a five-teacher ‘international court of justice.’”
[And then,] we have a 20-minute audio of an Overland, CO geography teacher attacking Bush, the US, and capitalism.
Capitalism, we learn from this teacher, is “at odds with humanity, with caring, and compassion.”
We further learn that America is a “quote, unquote democracy”; that there are “eerie similarities” between George Bush and Adolph Hitler; that some Americans “want to kill innocent people …. People who work in the CIA. People who have to think like that. These kinds of dirty minds, dirty tricks. That’s how the intelligence world works.”
Education Wonk does a good job with stories like this. Not just the screaming horrors, but the context of it all. Like this recent headline:
“Large numbers of high school dropouts say that they quit school because it wasn’t challenging enough.”
Yep. My two best friends in high school dropped out because it was too boring. Both outscored me by 50-100 points on the SATs. One’s a mathematician now, the others a psychologist. I might have gone the same route, but I realized there were girls in high school and there weren’t any at home. Of course, that was in the 1970s in one of the best public school districts in the country (Lower Merion, outside Philadelphia).
My son is now in 9th grade in a rural high school, probably typical of middle America. When I look over his shoulder at his homework, a depressing amount of it consists of word-search puzzles. He’s doing a science unit on astronomy. I don’t think he’s ever going to touch a telescope in the course of it, but he can now find the word “telescope” in a word-search puzzle. I’m sure he’s prepared for life.
In world cultures, he’s had a unit on India for about three weeks, one solid week of which consisted of watching, in class, the movie “Gandhi.” Hollywood is not history. Not only that, but this film in particular doesn’t deserve the title of film biography, except, as Neo-Neocon points out, “in the Oliver Stone-ish sense.”
“Where’s the politics in this?” You ask? “This is Donklepahnt, dammit. We demand a political bone to chew on.” OK, here you go. Courtesy of Jeff Goldstein:
I could be wrong, but I suspect that one of the keys to breaking up the overwhelming African-American/Democratic voting bloc will be the voucher and charter school issues, which will force the Democrats to choose between the teachers’ union and an increasing number of blacks (among others) who are looking for an alternative to a public education system that is failing them in staggering numbers�this despite the amount of money poured into the system.
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March 4th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Are American Kids Getting Dumber?
Tom Elia rounds up several recent studies with alarming statistics about the state of our education system in a post entitled, “Is We Educating Our Children Good?” Callimachus summarizes some of the more worrisome thusly:
A survey by A…
March 4th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Vouchers help smart, and easily-managed kids to flee the public schools. Public schools become schools of last resort. Private schools typically have very little interest in straining a muscle to deal with harder-to-teach kids.
As public schools have all the better students cherry-picked out, their student population will decline in performance. We’ll have an even more pronounced two-tier system than we have today.
My kids are in a very nice private school. That school is not going to suddenly begin accepting hard-to-teach students just because someone shows up with a voucher. My son in particular is a very bright kid, a kid who could raise test scores all by himself. I’ve cherry-picked him out of the public schools to their detriment. My daughter is more difficult, and the private school made it very challenging for us to stay there. The consensus seems to be that she may have to be “sent down” to the public school.
School vouchers is one of these magic-fix political isssues where we won’t have to try harder, won’t have to spend money, won’t have to do the difficult things. But it’s voodoo.
The more coldly logical answer, actually, would be to outlaw private schools. Then people like me, people with some money, some political smarts, would be trapped in the public schools with no alternative but to push for real improvements. If you took the parents from the top three or four private schools in our area, and pushed them into the public system, you’d see change happen very quickly. The parents in question are the faculties of our two major universities, professionals, techies, businessmen. Just about everyone with any money or muscle around here is out of the worst of the public systems, leaving the fixxing of the public system to people who may have no education themselves, or be strained financially.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
You really had to stretch and contort to make this a democrat problem. But my hat’s off you managed to do it, in your mind at least …
Keep those republican talking points coming.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Private schools, probably right. But what about Catholic parochial schools? They’re a very big and popular alternative here in the eastern cities. Even among non-Catholics. They don’t tolerate everyone, either, but they’re more willing to take the not-so-easy cases than is the average Country Day School.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Frankly, as a political issue, this is one nobody seems to want to own. But somebody better. It’s about much more than our children’s education. It’s about global competitiveness. And it’s about the death of the cities. I live in a small, minority-dominated city in a lily-white country. The inner 20 blocks of my city could be from any American city.
My ex-wife has the legal residence of my son, luckily for him, so that even though he spends most of his life here, he goes to school out there in the country. Which means he goes to a semi-crappy rural public school instead of a very crappy and deadly inner-city one. No sane parent who could afford it would let his child get past 5th grade in these city schools.
Yet just two or three miles down the road, in every direction, are homes you can buy where your kids can go to semi-decent suburban school districts. If you buy my home, you’ll not only pay more in school taxes (which in Pa. are 100% real estate taxes) because of the crumbling urban tax base, you’ll get a public school system that is frankly unworkable and unusable. It’s a slow downward spiral. Which is why I’ll never sell my house, and this city will never truly prosper, until this changes.
March 4th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
The conservative voucher argument is so disingenuous. They starve our public schools of funding. They refuse to raise teacher salaries so only the dumbest college grads become public school teachers. And then they complain that the public school system is failing.
Public schools can do great if they get the proper amount of funding. I grew up in an upper middle class city in Silicon Valley. Most of the public schools in Silicon Valley get really good funding from the local population. Anytime they need money they just put a measure on the ballot and it gets approved. The private schools cost way more but the public schools do just as good.
I would have received a better high school education if I went to my local public high school instead of the private high school I went to. 4 years of religion class meant I never got to take AP European History or cool electives like journalism, speech, and drama. All of my friends who went to the public high school got great educations and went to great schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, MIT, and Princeton.
I know that is the exception and a lot of public schools are not like that. But the problem isn’t the schools themselves it is the lack of funding and low teacher salaries. I just graduated from UCLA and none of my classmates are going into the teaching field. The only people I know who are going into teaching went to San Jose State.
Teaching isn’t attracting the best and the brightest because college grads know teachers don’t get paid much. I would have loved to become a high school teacher but I know they don’t get paid anything so instead I am going to law school now. We are essentially relying on missionaries to teach our children in our public schools. You can’t talk about the public schools failing until you give them the financial support they need to succeed.
March 4th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
The “starving the public schools of funding” is such a bunk argument. It makes a great sound bite, though, and Donks never seem to tire of the “more money always makes things better” mentality. Just give them a little more money, and a little more power (ie ban private schools, and if that’s not possible, at least demonize them).
Parents across this country would take, in a new york minute, 50% of the money allocated for their student to the public school system, and laugh all the way to the private school’s admissions office.
That would leave the public school systems, with 0 students to educate, running at 50% budget. I guess that’s “starving” in Donkspeak.
Speaking anecdotally, we have a 1:1 ratio of administrators to educators here in Wake County, NC. That crap NEEDS to starve.
March 4th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Lonely:
They would laugh all the way to the private school — then cry all the way home.
Sorry, but you don’t understand private shools. I send my kids to private school precisely so that I can shield them from the discipline problems, bullies and slow kids. It’s like suggesting that we could hand out vouchers for country clubs. People are kidding themselves. The private schools are good because they keep out the riff raff. How do people not get this? How do you not get that snob appeal is a big part of private schools? Even the Catholic schools work this way: they cherry-pick the easy kids and blow off the tougher kids. Even then they barely outperform well-run public systems.
Throw money at the problem? In our area the median wage for a teacher is 44k. That’s throwing money at the problem? I made more when I was waiting tables.
March 4th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
“Speaking anecdotally, we have a 1:1 ratio of administrators to educators here in Wake County, NC. That crap NEEDS to starve. ”
That is a problem. But the bigger problem is that becoming an administrator is the biggest promotion you can get in a teaching community. So the reward for the best teachers we have is taking them out of the classroom and putting them in administrator positions, which is completely different than the classroom, which they weren’t trained for and may not be good at. We should promote good teachers by paying them more and keeping them in the classroom. I’m all for varied pay scales based on teacher quality but we also need to raise teacher salaries significantly across the board so we start getting quality teachers into the profession and keeping them, instead of the constant influx of poor quality grads who end up leaving the profession in their first three years.
March 4th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
OK ….. I am gonna show my age here …. but …. here is history lived, by myself and many others :
In the 50’s and 60’s in Southeastern Penna. almost every small community had a grammer school that went to 8th grade. (Middle School hadn’t yet arrived). A 3rd Class city would have numerous grammer schools, Junior Highs, and one High school. Smaller Boroughs had the opportunity to select several High Schools for their students because they paid the tuition directly from the annial taxes based on percentage of attendance at each school. They also had part-time vaocational schools (very high quality ) until the early 70’s when some educated idiots decided that EVERYONE should go to COLLEGE, and funding was shifted. (Very sad indeed)
Let’s get political ….. a churning period of racial unrest (very valid) seeped into the politicos minds (particularly in the Northeast) and they came up with a solution …. redistricting …. looking back it smells like vouchers without the paper ….. Many small working class communities were forced to redistrict to the inner city schools and property taxes doubled, as well as “white flight” and circumspection about religous beliefs (many new Catholics appeared out of nowhere). The Catholic Schools at this time did not charge tuition for attendence and were a logical choice for the discipline alone. (little did we know then that leapfrog with the Acolytes would be a favorite game, but that is another topic altogether) In the early 70’s the diocese started charging a nominal tuition for attendence and accepted non-catholic students (Vouchers anyone?)
by the time my children reached high school age tuition was fairly steep by income standards for the area. A private Catholic Girls High school in 1984 was identical in cost to a State college in Penna.
In the early 1990’s I attended a regional Dioscese meeting held by the Cardinal to explain the closings of a number of Parish High Schools. It was the first (but not the last) time I sat through a Coopers-Lybrand Powerpoint presentation to show where the money was going. The catholic Schools regionalized, raised tuition, and went the way of the Public School System. (voucher mentality anyone)? We are talking about an organization that is wealthier than any other in the world. the Vatican could hold a yaard sale for one wekkend and fund the parishes for quite awhile, but the accountants have firmly grasped the reins.
Currently in the area where I reside we have (11) Charter Schools. About 60% have been rated as higher quality than the inner city schools(taken over by the State 5 years ago and doing worse than before).
The suburban schools on the other hand are pretty good. the teacher’s union is quite strong in these areas and the average salry for a teacher with 10 years and a Master’s is in the 80 -90 Thousand range.
I guess that my view is that the issues surrounding vouchers are pretty much caste by individual situations. the teaching business is different than it was 35-40 years ago. The playing field is different. Politically we have lost ground with our education priorities, lost the congruence between education and industry requirements, and fallen to the elitist (all our citizens must be College grads) society model. What we didn’t do as we took that path is make sure that there was some sort of industry to fall back on. we sent that overseas and they were happy to take it. And for all those who were fortunate enough to make some big bucks in the process, when the bottom falls out we can always call a Coopers- Lybrand type and ask about “vouchers” for income. China, canada Saudi Arabia all are accepting them these days. They read english pretty well. :)
March 4th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Michael Reynolds, you and your kind can keep sending your kids to these wonderful government schools.
With the political divide in this country, somewhere around half of these kids are statistically the children of Donks, right? If you guys believe in them so much, YOU stick around and send your kids to be the minesweepers in them.
Me? I’m pushing for choice. If I wanna’ “toughen up” my kid, that should be MY responsibility…not something dictated by the likes of YOU because you think your place is to determine what’s best for everybody else’s kids.
Speaking of snobbery, yours is lampoonable. Enjoying a privilege that you don’t think is right for other people to have. Much like the Donks you nominate for office. People of privilege are the only ones eligible to enjoy the privilege of private school.
God forbid the rubes in the cheap seats get the same chance.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Lonely:
You’re not getting this. Of course elite private schools are for the well-off. Have you spent much time in this country? They’re like country clubs. Vouchers won’t change that.
Look, my kid’s school? Probably 50% of the parents have advanced degrees. (Me, no.) It’s self-selecting, not just for money, but for other factors. That’s not going to change with vouchers. Here we have a Democrat private school, and a Republican private school. We have a free spirit ultra-liberal private school and a Montessori and a Waldorf. And we have a Catholic school. Each is like a club, each selects for certain characteristics, none are very interested in difficult kids. Each will give preference to easy-to-teach kids and parents who can write a nice check every year over and above tuition. The idea that vouchers will suddenly enable kids from working class, or inner city homes to join up is just fantasy.
Private schools are run by boards, or on occasion, by individuals. They aren’t required to take your kids just because you show up with a voucher. They can exclude you for ANY reason they like, as long as they aren’t caught making it about race. If they don’t like your accent, or the car you drive, or your occupation, they can exclude you.
Of course it’s snobbery: that’s just what I’m trying to tell you. Yes: it’s snobbery. Welcome to the US of A.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
It’s not snobbery. It’s the market at work.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Michael, you act as if the existing schools are the ONLY schools that are EVER going to exist.
So…say that exactly what you think is going to happen happens.
You don’t think that some enterprising group of (qualified) folks are going to just let that opportunity pass?
What you’re missing out on is the fact that vouchers will CHANGE THE WHOLE DYNAMIC! If there’s a demand for this product of private schools, the supply will surface.
You also act as if, once competition is introduced into the government school system, they will fail to improve. They will. Maybe even to the point that people don’t feel the need to leave them.
March 4th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Lonely:
let’s say that it happens just as you say. Starting a school is a tough job. It takes a lot of time and energy. It would take years and years before my area could build and staff enough private schools to take any significant chunk of public school kids. And whatever new private schools opened would do just as existing private schools do: cherry pick the easy kids. And they would choose from the same pool of teachers.
The hard-to-teach kids would gradually be left behind in the public schools which, of course, would find it hard to improve performance once they are deprived of every kid who is attractive to a private school.
What you’re missing is that the performance of schools –except in cases where truly extraordinary educators happen along — is much more about the quality of the kids and their parents than it is about the school per se. More private schools would just exaggerate what we already have: a two tier system. The best private schools would snag the richest and easiest kids and perform the best. A second tier of private schools would get the slightly less brilliant, less wealthy kids and perform not quite as well as the elite, and better than the public schools, which would become a dumping ground.
The competition would be horizontal: elite to elite, mid-range to mid-range, loser to loser, and do nothing to improve the overall performance of schools.
The second biggest factor, after the quality of kid, is the quality of teacher. In our area median teacher salary is 44k. That is not a salary that is going to attract the best and brightest. (salary is no higher in private school than in public.) And given the downward price pressure from free market schools, and the inability of public schools to even begin to improve if privates bleed off the best kids and teachers, or to raise salaries given the opting out of everyone with money or influence, I don’t see where we suddenly start attracting a new and better class of teacher.
You want to talk free market? As long as teaching pays badly we’ll have mediocre teachers. As long as the rich can opt out of public systems they’ll resist paying more taxes and continue to hold down teacher salaries. Holding down public school teacher salaries holds down private school salaries. We’ll continue with teachers who, if they can, will eventually move out of teaching.
There are no magic bullets. Vouchers are a shell game.
March 4th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Wow, man, it took you seven paragraphs to completely ignore increased efficiency. You could have done it in one, two max.
Yet you managed to sneak in the canard that low pay is the result of not enough money being spent on the project. As well as also ignoring the fact that there’s already a tier system, which only money allows one to escape. As well as mentioning that, hold onto your seats everybody, not every attempt at creating and running a school is going to succeed. And that running a school is hard work, which is why we’re in this mess in the first place.
For all of which would grant you extra credit, except for the fact that you’re contradicting yourself…remember, BAD kids are good for GOOD kids….or something like that.
That, and the fact that regardless of all of the above, you’re determined to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
March 4th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Your blind faith in the “free market solves everything” approach reminds me a lot of some liberal friends who feel the same way about government. I’m all for the free market and free trade but there are certain things where it just doesn’t work like the environment, like worker safety, and education. In those areas the free market just creates a race to the bottom where companies try to load their costs on the backs of the public as much as possible. In the environment they load their costs on us by polluting the air which raises our health care costs. It takes government regulation to prevent the companies from passing off these negative externalities on the public.
It’s the same with education. If you open up to a free market/voucher system, the private schools would just skim the best and the brightest students (who are way cheaper to educate than the problem kids from the inner city and broken homes). What’s left of the public education system would be just for these problem kids who are more expensive to educate, meanwhile the system is getting less and less support because of the vouchers. Don’t be naive about the free market. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. The profit motive is mostly great and we should foster it and be laissez-faire whenever we can but it is not some magic bullet that works for everything.
March 4th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
What amazes me is that the stiffest argument I’m seeing here is that talented and willing kids should be throttled back to accommodate the problem kids.
But hey, whatever lets you sleep at night.
And speaking of that, isn’t that exactly what the Donks trumpet they’re best at? Taking care of the meek, weak, less fortunate and disadvantaged? Why exactly is that such a horrible prospect? Isn’t that exactly when and where government SHOULD step up?
Unless of course the entire point is to enforce mediocrity, errr, equality. Which some folks would say the Donks are REALLY all about.
March 5th, 2006 at 12:22 am
“What amazes me is that the stiffest argument I’m seeing here is that talented and willing kids should be throttled back to accommodate the problem kids.”
It’s not about keeping the “talented” kids behind to accomodate the problem kids. It’s about providing equal educational opportunities for everyone. You never know when a kid is going to blossom and realize his/her academic potential. But if you go through with a voucher system you will doom everyone who gets left behind by the private schools.
My parents thought I was going to become a juvenile delinquent after I got suspended a few times in second grade but I ended up going to UCLA. My twin brothers had really really bad ADD and my parents thought they would have to go into the military or something but they blossomed in high school and are now electrical engineering majors at UC Davis.
I know plenty of smart kids who got into my private college prep high school only to get involved with a lot of drugs and partying and go down the wrong path and not go to college. I also know plenty of kids who were juvenile delinquents in junior high school but blossomed in high school and went to great four year universities. But if you embrace a voucher system you doom the early problem kids and they have no chance.
March 6th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Lonely,
I’m not exactly sure what you’re argument is, except “democrats suck.” Could you maybe explain it differently? I’m guessing you caught the Callimachus Bug. (Cal – your post was clipping along nicely until you suggested that what kids are learning – instead of what they need to – is that conservatives are bad. Are you kidding?)
The bottom line is what Michael has said, like 10 times. Private schools care about money, but there already are people with money. Just being able to pay tuition is not enough. I went to a private Catholic school from 3rd grade to end of college. All the kids had money for tuition (without vouchers), but lots of kids were kicked out. Why? Because ultimately they were a pain in the ass. And also because the school could kick them out, for virtually ANY reason. Therefore, what makes anyone think that a poor kid holding a voucher will be treated any differently than the rich kid with money? Maybe vouchers will provide smart, well-behaved, poor kids with a ticket out of the crappy public schools. I suppose it might be worth it just for that to be a possibility. However, the most needy, underprivileged, poorly educated kids will not benefit from this. Thus, the voucher system alone will not come close to solving the problem of crappy schools.
March 7th, 2006 at 4:10 am
If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. …just a wise saying, couldn’t help myself :-)
March 7th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Schoolteacher Jay Bennish is simply putting forward thoughts that any who claim spiritual descent from the Jeffersonian Whig Founders of the United States of America should have been realizing right after they heard GHW Bush’s public, “mystically” claimed “inability” to recall his whereabouts upon hearing of President Kennedy’s assassination: W’s only “qualification” for office.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5137581991288263801&q=loose+change
Any true American who watches the above, free video – “Loose Change, 2nd Ed.” – will recognize the fact that Bush committed 9/11 the same as his grandfather’s client, Adolf Hitler(Google “Prescott Thyssen Auschwitz”), committed the Reichstag Fire.
Inarguably, Bush is Hitler-redux. Those near him, or serving him – other than truly innocent dupes(?) – are transparently part of the “real anti-Christ” identified by Thomas Jefferson in his unsent letter to Samuel Kercheval.
Death for Treason
April 21st, 2007 at 8:16 pm
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June 4th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Big surprise here!! When the most philosophical topic kids can manage to come up with is who’s going to “be” the next American Idol, you know you’re in trouble.
But the good news is that you don’t have to learn, you can always join the military (no thinking required) just do what your told and the great thing about it is people think you are a big patriot for “fighting for their freedoms”.
I don’t want to seem as if I am superior to my common countrymen but if you take a real hard look around you’ll notice
most peoples’ knowledge starts at the living room sofa and ends at Deal or No Deal. When you have a nation full of such zombies who can blame the rest of the world that holds us in contempt? Spouting the tenets of the Holy Holy Constitution only go so far, especially when people know damn well our constitution says one thing and America has done another.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
That is if you were a White, Male, Land holding aristocrat. Then you might just have these unalienable rights, if you were Black, Chinese or any other hue in between, forget about it. A woman? hell they didn’t gain these “unalienable” rights until we were well into the 20th century. And it still goes on. We got more people, disproportionately black I might add in prison cells than any where else in the world.
Education starts with admitting all the Bull Shhhhh*** stories we tell ourselvs everyday that just don’t add up to reality. We complain about Mexicans invading “our” country? Lol! This country IS their country. The first [illegal] was white europeans, perhaps the Indians need to give us! amnesty not the other way around.