From the June 2008 edition of BayouVixen E-Magazine:
If you’re in Texas and already paying the $2.00 per $100 valuation maximum tax on education funding for your local school district, don’t be surprised if Governor Rick and the fools in the state Legislature show up next year with a proposal to erase that cap.
You see, we have once again entered the “there is an education crisis” phase: the public education system isn’t working and needs to be “reformed,” and to do that we’ll have to cough up more money. We don’t like the idea, but hey – children are our future.
Those who have been out of diapers for half a century are starting to catch on, however. This has happened before. Several times. And public education keeps getting worse.
Some of us were in high school when the first wave of education reform hit during the 1970s. Prodded by the U.S. Department of Education, schools across the country stumbled all over themselves to adopt Mastery Learning – grades weren’t important, “real-world” experiences were, and we needed to find a way to make school more relevant to kids because nearly one in 20 was dropping out and becoming an auto mechanic or some such menial profession.
As the state with the second-largest school-age population, Texas has been on the forefront of the waves of the education reform movement – when Mastery Learning failed, it was Outcome-Based Education. Then along came New Standards, High-Performance Standards, School to Work and, under our “education governor” George W. Bush, we decided there should be No Child Left Behind. The dropout rate in Texas is now more than 25 percent, and in some urban districts the number is closer to 50 percent.
By golly, it’s high time to fix education! Again.
The issue isn’t whether education needs to be fixed – that part is a given. The issue is who’s going to do the fixing. And the answer to that isn’t a good one, because the answer is that the same people who “fixed” it before are going to try and “fix” it again.
Just five years after pasting the conservative members of the State Board of Education who attempted to thwart Bush’s plan to implement a renamed version of Outcome-Based Education called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the New York Times and writers Diana Jean Shemo and Ford Fessenden in 2003 actually did some real journalism and found out that the “glowing successes” reported in the Houston ISD weren’t exactly successes. Shemo and Fessenden followed the story of one HSID student who had graduated at the top of her class and been named a Texas Scholar – but couldn’t cut the academic mustard at the hardly-challenging University of Houston and wound up in a trade school instead.
Bush won the Oval Office based on his record in Texas, but “an examination of the performance of students in Houston by The New York Times raises serious doubts about the magnitude of those gains.”
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, writing for deathfromrotalin.com, calls it “the great American education fraud” and suggests the primary problem with the U.S. public school system is the fact that educators have strayed from traditional teaching methodology.
“The great American education fraud consists of not teaching inner city, minority children to read in the proper phonetic manner, then expecting them to pass an academic assessment test based on so-called high standards in order to graduate,” Blumenfeld writes. “But how can they pass such a test when they’ve been deliberately crippled in the primary grades? The crippling process is deceptively simple but highly efficient. All you have to do is teach children in kindergarten and the first grade to develop a holistic reflex in reading and they will become poor readers for the rest of their lives.”
Blumenfeld examines the situation in Massachusetts, where Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” has wrecked academic achievement.
“In Boston, where the minority is now the majority in the city’s public schools, 50 percent of 10th graders failed English, 63 percent failed math, and 69 percent of eighth graders failed history. In Brockton, a city with a large Latino population, 69 percent of eighth graders failed history and 72 percent failed science. In Chelsea, another city with many Latinos, 84 percent of eighth graders failed science, 68 percent failed history. In Holyoke, 82 percent of eighth graders failed history, 81 percent failed science, and 58 percent of 10th graders failed English. Even in a town like Belmont, where a lot of Harvard faculty members live, 22 percent of eighth graders failed history.”
Many critics of the public education system maintain that this shift toward mediocrity is in fact intentional – designed to enable more and more American employers to shift their jobs overseas for a lack of qualified employees as part of a global plan to turn North America into a giant pool of service-industry workers.
“From early on in the history of public school systems there have been those who believe the intent is to provide enough education so the majority of students can function as “worker bees” but not be able, or motivated enough, to challenge the powers that be,” maintains David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow at the U.S. Freedom Foundation. “One example is Martin Luther who promoted education for the masses but primarily so they could adequately serve the needs of the church. Frederick the Great of Prussia did the same because of a perceived need for minimally competent workers and, especially, soldiers while, at the same time, not creating a citizenry that would challenge the emperor. Other nations, not least of all the United States, adopted features of the Prussian system.”
Kirkpatrick maintains that “mindlessness” is part of the established and accepted mindset in public education, and “Much of the public doesn’t just accept these practices, but has bought into these failed procedures as the way things should be done.”
Blogger Steve LaTulippe, writing at LewRockwell.com, says that the public’s ignorance of why education keeps failing is a key factor in allowing the education bureaucrats and slick marketers who keep introducing “reform” every few years to keep succeeding at it.
“But so long as the fundamental issues are ignored, no amount of “reform” or increased tax expenditures will make any difference,” LaTulippe writes.
“There are, in my opinion, two fundamental purposes of education. First, is the ‘nuts and bolts’ issue of teaching young people the basic skills they will need to survive and prosper in their adult lives. The second, more abstract purpose is to inculcate children with the values and traditions of their culture. This latter function gives children a guidepost for the philosophical essentials of living a moral life and allows them to psychologically place themselves on the larger continuum of their civilization. It should teach them what has come before, and inspire them to work to carry their culture forward.
“While socialism is destroying the first purpose of education, political correctness is strangling the second,” LaTulippe adds. “The system cannot be fixed any more than a fish can be taught to ride a bicycle.”
LaTulippe calls this “cultural Marxism,” and says it has created a far more serious problem than stupid students.
“Since the seizure of our academic infrastructure by 60’s Leftists several decades ago, the system’s core agenda has veered into the wilds of multiculturalism, ethical relativism, and radical egalitarian socialism. It is no exaggeration to say that the fundamental mission statement of the current system is to defame and deconstruct Western culture and history. The existence of Western civilization is blamed for most of the evils of history, and the value of its eradication is implicit in the very foundation of the system … And despite the system’s miserable failure at teaching basic academic skills, it is having a raging success at this corrupt new political undertaking.”
As we head into yet another round of “education reform,” however, the question remains whether traditionalists can this time be heard in the debate. In past years, like Texas’ State Board of Education, objections have been marginalized, ridiculed and intimidated into compliance with the status quo.
“Would that we could ‘tweak’ the entire education system in America and make it work again,” writes Alan Caruba in “The Destruction of American Education” for enterstageright.com. “The reality, however, is that the thing is broken. It doesn’t work. Year after year, children pass through it from kindergarten to twelfth grade, too frequently emerging into the world functionally illiterate and with their little heads crammed full of leftist and environmental nonsense of no value to anyone but the puppet masters who have crafted programs designed to make them docile, easily manipulated little ‘citizens of the world.’”
Caruba charges: “This year, the Bush administration blithely gave a $1.2 million grant to the United Nations-sponsored International Baccalaureate program designed to make students citizens of the world, not proud citizens of the United States. In the midst of our war on terrorism, the IB teaches ‘peace studies.’ … There’s a reason why home-schooling children has become the desperate and heroic option of parents who want to insure they receive a good education.”