New boy sitting in the office with bullet and manuals, 1950. (Photo by Camerique/Getty Images)
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In spite of the record costs, US schools get worse. The Nation’s reference card, also called a national evaluation of educational progress (NAEP), is conducting periodic tests to evaluate how many students they really learn and dominate mathematics, reading, writing, science, US history and politics.
Its latest evaluation shows tremendous results for our high school elderly: one third has no basic reading skills and 45% cannot even do elemental mathematics. Scores have been declining for years. (Specifically, this is not the case for charter schools.)
The Nation’s reference card confirms how awful things are. The fact that a record number of eighth graders cannot read and only one third of the elderly gymnasiums is prepared for college either in reading or in mathematics is a shame.
It is amazing that the K-12 educational institution has let this happen. The unions strongly resist any accountability for performance. Instead of improving class teaching, Pooh-Bahs training is trying to hide their failures by throwing the standards.
One manifestation of this moral illness is the classification of shares. It is difficult to believe that under its provisions students receive credit for work that have never been performed, unlimited test repetitions are allowed, do not receive penalties to avoid meeting the deadlines for work or for bypassing the classroom, and a minimum grade of 50 are awarded. Shares sorting has gained ground as student performance has been reduced. This is not a coincidence.
It is not strange that while high school graduation rates have increased over the last 30 years, students’ results have gone south.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank, focused on traditional educational authorities, in collaboration with Rand Corp. conducted a national representative survey of about 1,000 K-12 teachers. About half of the teachers said their school or area had adopted one or more stock practices and most teachers said they were harmful. But research found that although most teachers said they wanted high standards for their students, many felt pressured to inflate the grades.
By assimilating the standards for performance, shares classification has encouraged and hidden academic dysfunction. Whether a student has learned something is irrelevant. Talk about what former President George W. Bush was described as “the soft fanaticism of low expectations”.
It should be no surprise that domestic education is increasing, as is the amazing movement of education accounts, where parents, not school bureaucrats, control the money used to educate their children.
The stock scandal underlines a devastating phenomenon, which has increasingly strangled the spirit of America since the 1960s with countless rules and regulations.
The perverted idea is that massive, intrusive rules and laws can replace the human crisis. Increasingly, the result is that personal responsibility has been limited, especially to the government. Noted legal reformer Philip Howard, author of such best sellers as The death of common sense and the recent CAN-DO Savings: How to revive America’s spiritHe points out why nothing seems to be happening anymore, including the education of our children.
The shares classification, which limits the discretion of teachers, should be junked. Most of the huge huge rules that govern the event should also be given to Heave-Ho. We need to restore the power of teachers to control their classrooms without fear of bullying. We should also keep managers personally responsible for how well their schools are doing. If they succeed, they are rewarded. If they don’t, they go.
