Education

Few countries spend what America spends, per student, on education, yet we are nowhere near the top when it comes to test scores. Why is that? We’re spending nearly $10,000 per secondary school student; could it be that we aren’t spending enough on education?

According to the latest (2006) Programme for International Student Assessment, American students ranked 33rd among industrialized countries in Math literacy, and 27th in Science. Reading literacy was not reported due to an error in the 2006 test instruction booklets, but in the previous assessment American students were 20th.

If we look at educational spending among the participant countries, we see that a few nations, such as Switzerland and Norway, spend more than the United States does on education, but what about Finland, South Korea, the Slovak Republic and Hungary, who spend much less than we do yet produce students with greater math and science literacy?

If educational expenditure is no predictor of academic performance, then what is?

Maybe our shortcomings are a result of our having no national standards, no national objectives, and by extension, no national expectations. Perhaps it’s because ignorant school boards and entrenched teachers’ unions routinely impede innovation. Or, could it have something to do with the overall quality of the people responsible for doing the teaching?

I have personally had many wonderful teachers, and some of them have had a profound impact on my life. However, there are trends among the education class that are too powerful to ignore. For example, students who choose education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major, and those who graduate with an education degree score lower on graduate school admissions tests than any other major. In other words, as a group, the folks who end up teaching our children aren’t exactly the “sharpest tools in the shed.”

What is it about our Schools of Education that draws the least capable students? Is this why we have math teaching techniques such as those found in “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers,” with topics such as “Sweatshop Accounting,” “Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood,” “Multicultural Math,” and “Home Buying While Brown or Black,” the latter with discussions on racial profiling, the war in Iraq, corporate control of the media and environmental racism. Is this why some fifth-graders are taught from a textbook with the seemingly straightforward title “Everyday Math,” but which asks the students study questions such as “If math were a color, it would be _____ because _____” and “If it were weather, it would be _____ because _____”?

Within this context, is it unreasonable to wonder just how much our children are being focused on actual mathematics? Are history classes peppered with multiplication tables? Is long division being taught in literature classes? What is being taught in science classrooms?

These roadblocks to a classical education don’t end with secondary education; a whole new set of problems confront our youth when they go off to college.

In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, Stanley Fish, distinguished professor, author, and hero of the academic Left, warned that the pervasive leftist politics of many of our professors and administrators are posing a threat to the quality, integrity, and academic independence of colleges across the country.

Citing “Indoctrinate U,” a documentary by twenty-something film-maker Evan Maloney that shines a light on the classroom politics and blatant bias at major universities, Mr. Fish summed up the film as portraying mainstream universities in America as “places of indoctrination where a left-leaning faculty teaches every subject, including chemistry and horticulture, through the prism of race, class and gender; where minorities and women are taught that they are victims of oppression; where admissions policies are racially gerrymandered; where identity-based programs reproduce the patterns of segregation that the left supposedly abhors; where students and faculty who speak against the prevailing orthodoxy are ostracized, disciplined and subjected to sensitivity training; where conservative speakers like Ward Connerly are shouted down; where radical speakers like Ward Churchill are welcomed; where speech codes mandate speech that offends no one; where the faculty preaches diversity but is itself starkly homogeneous with respect to political affiliation; where professors regularly use the classroom as a platform for their political views; where students parrot back the views they know their instructors to hold; where course reading lists are heavy on radical texts and light on texts celebrating the Western tradition; where the American flag is held in suspicion; where military recruiting personnel are either treated rudely or barred from campus; where the default assumption is that anything the United States and Israel do is evil.”

Mr. Fish concedes that he knows “professors who use the classroom as a stage for their political views,” and adds that “Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary.”

So, what are those in academia doing to right their ship? Lowering their standards. The University of California, for example, is considering sweeping changes to their admissions process. The key changes being proposed are to lower the current requirement of a 3.0 GPA to 2.8, and to eliminate the requirement for certain (SAT II) subject tests. What is their goal? To deliver less intelligent, but more impressionable students into the hands of left-wing professors with a political axe to grind and the autocratic power to do so within an educational system that is failing to create critical thinkers? No; they already have that. What they seek is Diversity.

Like most other institutions of higher learning, UC wants to increase their diversity and they see the reduction or elimination of academic standards as the key to boosting the admission of blacks and Hispanics (who, on average, do worse on standardized tests than whites and Asians). What they don’t want anyone to know, and what we’re supposed to ignore, is that almost all students, regardless of race, color or creed, are more likely to graduate from college when they attend campuses where their grades and test scores are generally the same as their peers. Isn’t graduation -- you know, the standard measure of our effectiveness in successfully educating our students -- the point?

In the end, all attempts to attain an artificial level of diversity, particularly by ignoring all objective measurements of academic ability, only helps the university, not the student. The notion of diversity-as-societal-change-agent is just another example of the misguided Liberal pathology, and of the institutionalized self-interests which comprise so much of the Leftist ideology. And, like most of the Liberal “platform,” it’s had just about zero scrutiny.

Remember all the brouhaha regarding the Liberals’ grand scheme for “diversifying” our primary and secondary schools by bussing our children all over the place? Yeah…me neither. But isn’t it interesting that the Left was able to pull off such a stunt to begin with, and then suffer no damage to their reputation (or "voting base") whatsoever? Imagine if our education systems were staffed and managed by an overwhelmingly Conservative majority, and they had said, “Instead of addressing the apparent disparity in the quality of the public education dispensed in ‘black schools’ versus that of ‘white schools,’ we’ve decided that it would be easier to just transport your children away from their home and away from their neighborhood schools to a different school across town.” And, if they were really honest: “We know this does not address the core problems, and we know the long morning bus rides won’t be a lot of fun, and we know the extra time, aggravation, and apprehensiveness are not conducive to improving your child’s educational experience, but we do feel that it is worth it because we will be increasing the Diversity of the school system, at large.”

Wow. Can we look back on that -- yet??? -- and ask ourselves, “What the Hell were we thinking?”

Teaching is a difficult profession, and a noble one, but perhaps it’s time to take a step back, reassess where we are, and where we want to be. Where do we want to be? Where do we start?

Let’s take back our education system by insisting on school vouchers so our children can attend elementary, junior and senior high schools where teachers want to teach and children want to learn. Let us also get back to basics; instilling the curriculum found in E.D. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge” curriculum (or something very similar) would be an excellent start. In high school, let’s identify students whose aptitudes lend themselves to either higher education or to vocational systems and direct their studies accordingly. Not everyone wants or needs to attend a college or university to achieve competence and satisfaction in their preferred field of endeavor, so let’s stop herding everyone down the “college” path and start paying attention to the natural inclinations of our young adults. If we do those things which help them to attain a core competence in their area(s) of interest, all of society will benefit.

REFERENCES & ADDITIONAL READING

Programme for International Student Assessment, http://www.pisa.oecd.org/
“Even the Left Admits that Classroom Politics are a Problem” by John Zmirak, 11/7/07
“Academic Slums” by Walter E. Williams, 12/19/07
“Politics in the Post-Gutenberg Age” by Suzanne Fields, 1/7/08
“What Ails Schools? No National Standard” from The Atlantic, excerpted in The Informed Reader, The Wall Street Journal, 1/10/08
“Dumbing Down Higher Education” by Linda Chavez, 1/11/08
“Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality” by Charles Murray
The Core Knowledge Curriculum by E. D. Hirsch