Posted on 07/20/2013 2:07:44 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Thirty years ago, a panel of distinguished experts concluded that US public schools were so bad they could be an enemy attack.
The famous Nation at Risk Report stated: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Thirty years later, nothing has improved. Probably the opposite.
(“Nation is at Greater Risk. But everyone pretends not to know why." A new Examiner article explains why our schools don't improve. Link below.)
We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of the most famous educational reports in history. It said that things are really, really, really bad.
But guess what? Our Education Establishment has a grip like death itself on the schools of America. They are not allowed to improve. As a quote in the article indicates, we know the answers. We just seem to lack the political willpower to do anything about it.
That's close to the truth, but it's not the whole truth. We have the political willpower to fix the schools. But the Education Establishment has greater political willpower to make sure that doesn't happen.
Really, give credit where it's due. We have people in charge of education who (I would say for obvious social engineering reasons) absolutely don't want great schools. Every stat shows you that kids aren't learning to read, don't learn to master arithmetic, and don't learn basic facts about the world, this country, our history, or anything else.
Now, I'm not saying that the top 10-15% of the kids are not well-educated. There are excellent schools; and there are gifted programs even in bad schools. (But I often suspect the main reason we have gifted programs is to keep those gifted parents out of the way!)
So that leaves 85% of the kids who are mainstreamed at the same level. Not completely bad. But not good either. We always seem to be at about 23rd in various international competitions, in every subject. We spend more than almost everybody else spends per student. How do we manage to end up far outside of the top five? Quick answer: ideological fanaticism and hard work.
I'm afraid the Common Core will just try to lock in all this mediocrity, despite the impressive talk about new and improved "standards."
Suppose a football team announces that in the next season there will be a new standard: all players will run the hundred in 9.2. That's the standard. Which is absolutely not the same thing as saying that anybody can actually do it.
This is one thing our Education Establishment has been absolutely brilliant at throughout the past century: PAINTING THE PRETTY PICTURE.
It's like one of those billboards for a new housing development – everything is so beautiful – but somehow the development is never built and there is just a pretty billboard standing out forlornly on the highway.
At this moment the Common Core Crowd is painting a beautiful picture of all the new things your schools will do. The standards have been announced! What could be the problem?
Surely every player can run the hundred in 9.2. That's just a given now.
Similarly, every student will be able to read fluently. They will be able to multiply and divide. They will know that the Civil War happened in the 19th century. That will be a huge jump, by the way. All three of those things.
My point is, if our Education Establishment could do these things and really wanted to do these things, why didn't they do them for the last 30 years????????
Why should we think they will suddenly now start doing them???????
Forgive my cynicism. I suspect all the talk about fancy new standards is just a way of keeping our minds off the fact that things stood still for 30 years. Or maybe got a little worse.
New article is here: http://www.examiner.com/article/nation-at-greater-risk-but-everyone-pretends-not-to-know-why At the end are three related articles that might help some parents to work around the obstacles. --
The teachers of today are the useful idiots from 30 years ago. They are too stupid and brain washed to even realize there is a problem.
And if you read the communist manifesto for America you will see it was an enemy attack. But then, you would have to be able to read.
Sure looks like all you care to post are things you have written yourself:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:brucedeitrickprice/index?tab=articles
Are you some kind of narcissistic freak or merely a self-promoter?
Segregate the schools and the education of both blacks and whites will improve.
Call me anything you like but both white and black schools got dumped in the toilet right after integration.
I know. No one will ever admit that. But when you think about it, its hard to deny .
I would say that this started a long time ago. Note how many on FR put an apostrophe in the plural of a noun.
“But then, you would have to be able to read.”
Somebody please tell me how how she could write in cursive if she couldn’t read it. I never saw that in the testimony. Did I miss it?
If results must be equal, standards must disappear.
firewall blocks the picture.. Darn!
“Somebody please tell me how how she could write in cursive if she couldn’t read it”
she’s a “special” student...
which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”
which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”
which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”
which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,
which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
All of the things you list there are failures and ought to be done away with.
I remember about 1970 there was a book that was popular among leftist educators and future teachers - “Teaching as a Subversive Activity.” It seems to me that public education went into decline as soon as that generation took over the schools.
Race is an 800lb gorilla in the room of education. Part of the reason educational standards have dropped over the years is that consistently, blacks fell to the bottom. The response has been to lower the standards. The tests were all “culturally biased” or based on “White Privilege”. Unfortunately, a problem cannot be solved, if it cannot be discussed, and the discussion usually ends with the scream of “RACIST!!”
It was a slam-dunk for the defense that she did not write the letter, and that, most likely, someone in the prosecutor's office wrote it for her for the trial. It was one of several moments that showed that the star witness was utterly unreliable.
Poorly educated people are better prospects for serfdom than the well educated.
bump
A grave threat to liberty is a nationalized school system. Along with that, is a national standard and a national curriculum. And yet, Common Core is a step towards that. Creeping Federalization of education should be viewed as steps toward a totalitarian state.
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