December 4, 2005
Lying to Ourselves on Education
By Pat
Buchanan
In his Inaugural
Address in 1965, Lyndon Johnson, coming off one of the great landslides,
spread out the plans for his Great Society. It was the heyday
of liberalism, and those were days of hope. After civil rights,
education topped the agenda.
On April
11, at the grammar school he attended, LBJ signed the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, the first federal education law in
U.S. history, focused on disadvantaged children.
And after
40 years and trillions of tax dollars plunged into public education
at all levels, how stands public education?
Well, it
depends. Sam Dillon reports in Sunday's New York Times:
"After Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math
this year, state officials at a jubilant news conference called
the results 'a cause for celebration.' Eighty-seven percent of
students performed at or above the proficiency level."
Mississippi's
fourth-graders did even better at math, with 89 percent performing
at or above proficiency levels. Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Texas
and Alaska reported equally exhilarating results.
Fly in the
ointment: These were the results of tests designed by state officials.
On the national test mandated by No Child Left Behind, only 22
percent of Tennessee's eighth-graders passed, and only 18 percent
of fourth-graders in Mississippi could do fourth-grade arithmetic.
By national standards, four of every five kids in the Tennessee
and Mississippi public schools are failing.
Inescapable
conclusion: State official are dumbing-down tests so even the
slowest kids can pass, to keep the federal dollars flowing in
and federal sanctions from being imposed.
Put crudely,
state officials are colluding in a fraud to deceive parents, kids
and themselves about the progress, or lack of it, being made by
the public schools. They are like baseball officials who, unhappy
with the paltry production of home runs, lower the mound, narrow
the strike zone, create a new rabbit ball, bring in the left-
and right-field fences and look the other way at steroid use --
then celebrate all the great hitters who beat Babe Ruth's record.
In four
states -- Missouri, Wyoming, Maine and South Carolina -- state
test scores closely tracked federal scores. In South Carolina,
which sets world-class standards, 30 percent of the kids passed
the feds' eighth-grade math test, but only 23 percent passed the
state test. Apparently, educators in South Carolina don't believe
in lying to themselves.
The ultimate
test is how American kids stack up in a world where leadership
in math and science eventually translates into military power
and global dominance. In all recent world tests where they have
competed, the Chinese on the mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan
and Korea come in at or near the top, as Americans bring up the
rear. We may lie to ourselves about how well we are doing, but
the world will one day find us out.
The lying
has been going on a long time now. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s,
Americans wrung their hands at falling SAT scores of high school
seniors in math and English. Some educators wailed that the tests
were cruel, unfair and culturally biased. So, testing criteria
were made less rigorous and altered to make comparisons with earlier
years more difficult. Now, the SAT scores are no longer cause
for concern.
"Humankind
cannot stand too much reality," said T.S. Eliot. The reality
is that a vast acreage of U.S. public education is a wasteland.
"Rarely
is the question asked: Is our children learning?" said George
Bush pungently in Florence, S.C., in the 2000 election. As we
now know -- and, in truth, have known for decades -- American
children are not learning as once they did. And the ethnic gaps
in achievement that existed 40 years ago persist up to today.
Nothing has changed.
Why? Classrooms
are far smaller. Teacher salaries are far higher. School budgets
are far larger. Where it cost $250 a year to educate a child in
Washington, D.C., in 1950, which probably translates into $2,500
today, the per-capita cost of educating kids in Washington schools
is over $10,000. While that is among the highest in the nation,
Washington test scores remain among the lowest. We have Head Start
and school lunches, and every demand the reformers have made has
been met. The I.Q. tests have been thrown out, and the track system
abolished.
Explanations
for the failure are many. The collapse of the family. Kids coming
to school unmotivated and unprepared. Disruptions in the classroom.
Violence and drugs in the schoolyard. The lure of TV, videogames
and the street pulling kids away from desks, where generations
spent hours doing homework. But are these the explanation, or
excuses? Does it make any difference?
At the turn
of the millennium, pundits were saying that not only had the 20th
century been "the American Century," the 21st would
be, as well. Brits were probably saying the same thing back in
1900.
Great, indeed,
is our capacity for self-deception.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
