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I weep for the future of education
Published March 4, 2007
America’s kids are stupid.
At least, that’s what the message seems to be following the announcement of the National Assessment of Annual Progress, or the national report card, results released by the federal government last week. Scores for reading and math, calculated in a test given to high school seniors in 2005, are lower than ever: 35 percent of 12th graders were proficient in reading and 23 percent were proficient in math.
Simply put, these numbers are bad.
That means that 65 percent of seniors graduating from high school can’t read well enough to analyze a text, infer meaning beyond bluntly stated messages or identify central themes of a work. They probably got lost in this column three sentences ago.
As for math, well, let’s just say that balancing a checkbook is probably harder than it should be for a lot of people.
Education doom stories come down the pipeline fairly regularly, to remind us that we are doing a bad job of teaching our children anything beyond the second grade. More children know about the sex life of Paris Hilton or the ins and outs of the Anna Nicole Smith trial than about the Boston Tea Party or the Great Depression.
But this latest story should have us all tearing clothing and sitting in ashes and wearing sackcloth — or at least scratching our heads — as we try to figure out why our kids got so stupid.
Stupid is a strong word, of course, and not one that anybody wants to identify their own child. Which is part of the problem. Every parent thinks their kid is some sort of prodigy, even as they come home with failing marks in arithmetic. Then again, with rampant grade inflation in many places, maybe those marks got upgraded to a solid B.
There are a lot of factors that could have led up to this problem: grade inflation, teaching to the test, nonsensical federal mandates (test scores have not risen since the beginning of No Child Left Behind) and other flaws inherent in the current educational philosophies.
This report card will have people screaming for more accountability and accusing teachers of not doing their job, despite the fact these teachers often have their hands tied by federal guidelines concocted by know-nothing lawmakers. There is no solution in attacking the educators.
The two real problems are more complex, and much more difficult to combat. One is simply the educational atmosphere for children, where kids spend all their time on computers and MySpace, instead of in books. Kids would rather watch videos on YouTube than read a Dickens novel (not that I could always blame them for that).
The other problem, one that is constantly identified and never addressed, is the self-esteem issue.
American schools spend so much time making students feel good about themselves, they often forget to teach them anything to justify such feelings. Our kids can’t read or add, but they certainly like themselves.
Maybe we should tell kids they’re worthless instead, and tell them the way to fix it is to learn algebra and read some Faulkner. Then we might see some test scores rise as kids strive to better themselves, since they’re not all “unique and special.”
But then they might feel sad. I weep for the future of American education.
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