1: Has American Education Become a "Fixer-Upper"?

Number One in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Derek Bok, President of Harvard University, 1971-90.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Education published the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment of how well the students of twenty-one nations performed academically in these subjects. American students scored 19th. 

Of the sixteen nations that participated in the math portion, our best and brightest, math students taking advanced placement classes, scored 15th.

In calculus, they were 14th out of 15, and in geometry, they were dead last.

In the science portion, advanced placement high school senior physics students, who were the pride of the Intel Science Search, also scored last.

In a statement about the quality of our math students, the Department of Education said that half of 17 year olds lacked the math skills commonly taught in the 8th and 9th grades.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally conducted assessment of learning in reading, math, science, history, and geography, found the following: Two out of three didn’t know the meaning of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; half the high school students didn’t recognize Patrick Henry’s challenge “Give me liberty or give me death;” even fewer knew that there had been a War of 1812, or had heard of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII.

In science, the majority couldn’t figure out that a shadow cast by the rising sun would fall to the west.

In geography, the majority were unable to locate Southeast Asia on a world map.

Only one 11th grader in eight was deemed “adequate” in a test of analytical writing.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test was taken by 70% of 11th graders between 1988 and 1998. During that decade, the scores of “A” students declined by a statistically significant 13 points, even though at the same time, the number of “A” students taking the test increased by 30%.

Why was this?

Quite simply, there was an active attempt to disguise the students’ declining academic achievement by inflating their grades.

TV talk show host Jay Leno, and TV-radio talk show host Sean Hannity often do “Man in the Street” interviews, usually of young adults, many of whom are college students. They run across such things as: the inability to name the three main branches of the government; to recognize a picture of Hillary Clinton; or to name the Vice President of the United States.

The business community has complained that a third of high school graduates need remedial training in the “basics” in order to be able to function in the jobs for which they were hired.

The high-tech industry says that it would not be able to stay in business if their employees were limited to hiring American-educated graduates; they must hire large numbers of better-educated foreigners in order to maintain productivity.

Our graduate schools award about 45% of the Ph.D.s in the hard sciences such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science to foreigners, without whom many departments in these subjects would have to close their doors.

As far back as 1983, in a stunning federal report called “A Nation at Risk,” it was shown that student performance was falling at all levels, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The situation was considered so serious that it was described in terms of a plot: If an enemy of our country wanted to do us grave harm, it would design and implement the educational system we had then. Today, nearly 25 years later, the situation remains essentially unchanged.

Has our educational system become a “fixer-upper”?

Some - and I am among them - believe it has been brought to its knees, and that our culture, our country, and our very civilization are at serious risk as a result.

Next time, I'll begin to discuss how we started down the road that led us to this point.

Comments

[Mark Alexander]

A warm welcome to the blogsphere, Cubed!

[Eleanor]

Cubed good luck with your new blog-For several decades I lived and worked in that rattle-trap-clunker of an education system, and despaired during its decline into the junker it has become today.

My county educational TV system offers seminar by "experts" who are determined to lift American education up. Of course, they all must work within the framework of "No Child Left Behind" and "Accountability," creating and evaluating the standards and the testing programs to prove that students have met the standards, a analyze why they haven't.

The testing program hangs like a dead weight on the shoulders like a yoke on oxen, beats that are pressed into service to perform tasks under the uncompromising whip of the overseers.

Our system does need to be fixed up, but freedom from unions, predatory administrators, and accountability would do wounders.

Many was the time that I wanted to organize a picket line with placards reading: "Free the Madison 30." The Madison 30 were the colleagues with whom I worked in James Madison Middle School under slave-like conditions.

Performance is bad because teachers are demoralized. Teachers are demoralized because of poor working conditions, ineffective administration, belligerent and unruly students that refuse to "assimilate to the norms of adults running the school."

They refuse to assimilate because of many reasons. Schools don't like change. Much of what is taught is not relevant to real life.

The reality of students lives have changed, and the schools are scrambling to catch up with them, rather than being the lead, That put students in a position of power. Students with brains that literally "are under construction," and will be well into their 20s.

Parents have changed, students have changed, the world has changed, yet schools are slow on the uptake.

Hope springs eternal. Educators understand that they and their schools are in trouble and they are taking steps to improve: to weed out the bad apples, to improve instruction, curriculae, structure, and to do what it takes.

[Cubed]

Mark,

Thank you! This subject is something that has been gnawing at my innerds like the bird that was eating Prometheus' liver every night. I finally "caved" to my anger and anxiety and decided to address the issue in a blog devoted solely to it.

Eleanor,

You are straight out of the foxhole, and the enemy is still entrenched just over the hill.

You have really named a lot of the most important causes and obstacles to a solution (unions, predatory administrators, lack of accountability, demoralized teachers) and I hope not only to add to the long list, but to discuss some solutions.

We face some very real short-range problems (Islam etc.) that we must deal with NOW, but if we hope to hold the line until we achieve victory, we must prepare our children to maintain and perfect the civilization provided for us by the Founders.

[Bearster]

What about John Dewey's idea that children should be socialized at the expense of learning?

What about the numbing and chilling effects of political correctness?

What about the fact that children are forced to attend and taxpayers are forced subsidize? Does this not destroy any incentive that anyone might ever have to make an improvement? Does this not guarantee ever rising costs and ever-declining performance?

[Cubed]

Bearster,

You are hitting many nails on the head, as I would expect you to; the seizure of our children's minds by the government is the premiere reason why we have all but hit bottom (truly, I think we will sink deeper if we don't get started on a course correction very soon).

Please hang in there - I feel a lot like a trial lawyer slowly building the case for separation of education and state! Boy, the evidence for why it is that government is such a big part of the problem, rather than the solution is pretty overwhelming!

[JasonP]

I had once worked in a state college that trained engineers for the merchant marine. The college had a two week orientation (more affectionately called the indoctrination) that psyched the students for their first semester. One of the most painful things I’ve ever seen was the demoralization of freshman after the first few weeks when reality set in. The school was a disaster, the faculty was demoralized, the administration was completely out of touch, and the students were understandably cynical.

Today, here at work, we find very few American born candidates with appropriate math and computer skills. Most of our employees are foreign born. I actually give written tests during job interviews since degrees mean nothing. This worked fine until about two years ago.

The government has changed the immigration process to discourage hiring immigrants. I have to prove that our employee does the work that an American wouldn’t do regardless of salary. The only proof acceptable is showing that no one with the same degree would take the job. If a complete idiot from a diploma mill applies for the job and demands twice the pay, my employee doesn’t get immigration approval (or so our lawyers tell us).

Thus, we have a government that fails to educate and insists I hire the uneducated.

[Cubed]

Jason,

I'm sorry you've been caught up in the mess. It's getting harder and harder to do business.

Re: "...degrees mean nothing..." That's the truth! We have the same problem in medicine; up to the time I retired (I don't know what the current situation is) the only MDs that were accepted for practice here without having to be closely scrutinized were the Brits, Canadians, and Germans (I can't remember about the Aussies). During my residency, there were several foreigners, all of whom had been senior physicians in their homelands, and the standards of education in those countries is so dubious that they had to start over, with new internships and then residencies, and take all the exams (National Boards etc.). Of about 12, there was only one that I thought I would have been comfortable with as a patient.

Given the anti-business attitude of the bureaucrats/politicians, it doesn't surprise me that you have had so much trouble being able to hire the best people for the job, regardless of where the applicant came from. "Somehow," no matter how many obstacles the gov throws up, they figure the business will figure out a way to make things work.

Up here, Microsoft has about 26,000 employees at the Redmond campus, and you can't walk down the hall without running into a foreigner. I guess it takes something with the "pull" (to say nothing of the money) of a Microsoft to overcome the problem.

I have heard many high-tech companies complaining that they would have to decrease production if they couldn't hire foreigners, and Microsoft is one of them. In fact, one of the reasons they establish overseas satellites is because of the difficulty of getting enough qualified people into the country.

And re: the government's failure to educate - well, education for knowledge hasn't been the goal since the early 1900s, thanks to the likes of Freud and Dewey - but I'll be getting into that a little later!

Eeeeuuu! It pushes my button just to think about it!