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It’s September again, and fall has arrived right on cue
here in the nation’s capital. As if by God’s own hand, Labor
Day weekend brought a much-welcomed ten-degree drop in
temperature and a crisp (almost cool) breeze. The trees on my
street already have a few yellow leaves, and the department
stores are selling snow boots, winter coats, and turtleneck
sweaters.
The other thing that the dawn of September brought was a
return to school for most children in America’s public
schools. Many back-to-school headlines focused on the atrocious
clothing styles available to kids, and school administrators’
futile attempts to ban bellybuttons and bra straps from the
halls of learning.
I myself watched in amazement over the holiday weekend as
young women of no more than 14 years of age charged through a
local shopping mall, mothers in tow, spending hundreds and even
thousands of their parents’ dollars on runway-worthy ensembles
to wear to geometry class.
One girl of about thirteen (sporting a mouthful of braces and
a painted-on t-shirt with the word "Sexy" scrawled
across her nonexistent bosom), picked up a pair of spike-heeled,
knee-high leather boots, and announced loudly to her mother,
"I want these!" Mom, who looked like an older, more
pathetic version of her daughter (tight t-shirt stretched across
sagging breasts and short-shorts revealing ample cellulite and
varicose veins), sighed heavily, but purchased the boots with
little protest.
After the look-alike mom and daughter departed the shoe
section, I looked at the price tag on the boots they had
purchased – they were $310. I thought back to junior high, and
how hard I was on shoes at that age (and still am!). My mother
would have been stupid to pay more than twenty bucks on an item
I would undoubtedly have destroyed within weeks. I may have
complained incessantly about wearing cheap shoes, but – like
most good parents – Mom was right.
While children were bleeding their parents’ bank accounts
dry at Bloomingdale’s, teachers were preparing their
classrooms for the post-Labor Day rush. Confusion was the order
of the day in Fairfax County, Virginia, where an acquaintance of
mine teaches, and where kids countywide were up to two hours
late on the first day of school due to bus drivers getting lost
on their new routes. That scene was surely played out in school
districts across the nation, resulting in hours of lost
classtime and a disgraceful waste of our tax dollars.
If super-low Levi’s and lost bus drivers were the public
schools’ worst problems, we would be in pretty good shape. But
three news stories released this week paint a much bleaker
picture for the nation’s public schools and the children who
attend them.
The most shocking and troubling of this week’s reports came
out of Illinois. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that
5,243 teachers in the Illinois school system flunked the most
basic of skills and competency tests. Teachers in that state
must pass both the Basic Skills test and a subject matter test
in order to receive a regular teaching certificate, but
loopholes in the law allow some teachers who have not passed one
or both tests to teach anyway.
The Basic Skills test is just that – a test of basic
skills. In theory, eighth graders should be able to pass the
test with few exceptions. In practice, there are 868 teachers in
Illinois who have repeatedly failed and have yet to pass
this simple exam, and many more who failed one or more times
before finally passing.
Of the test, Tom Loveless (Director of the Brown Center on
Education Policy at the Brookings Institution) said: "This
is a test designed to screen out completely illiterate teaching
candidates, so the fact that someone passes this test is not
something to throw a party over. It doesn't mean they are a good
candidate. [sic] It simply means they are not illiterates."
If you multiply the above statistics out, assuming that each
exam-failing teacher has 30 students, today there are 157,290
students in Illinois learning from teachers who are basically
illiterate. If these teachers are at the junior high or high
school level teaching five classes per day, the number is even
higher – 786,450 students are learning from college
graduates who struggled and/or failed to pass a basic test
of reading and computation skills. Obviously, something has gone
very wrong in America’s public school system.
Elsewhere in America, educators from foreign shores are being
hastily recruited to head overcrowded classrooms in both inner
city and suburban schools. The adjustment is difficult for both
students and their teachers. While students complain that
instructors’ heavy accents are difficult to understand, the
teachers are finding that the priorities in American schools are
much different than those in their native countries. New Indian
immigrant and Columbus, Ohio math teacher V. Phani Bhushan put
it this way in an interview with the Associated Press:
"First is discipline, then math." Kind of says it all,
doesn’t it?
Lastly, a new study by the American Legislative Exchange
Council (made up of 2,400 state legislators from both major
parties) contrasted the per-pupil educational spending of all 50
states and the District of Columbia with student achievement on
several standardized tests. The results of the study were more
or less a ranking of how much educational ‘bang for the buck’
taxpayers are getting in their respective states.
The study found, not surprisingly, that some of the states
that spent the most money had the worst academic performance.
The best example of this was the District of Columbia, which
ranked fifth in per-child spending at $8,055, but came in 50th
in academic achievement (only Mississippi scored lower). The 1st-place
state in academics, Iowa, ranked 32nd in per-pupil
spending ($5,725), putting that state in third place on the
A.L.E.C.’s ‘best buy’ survey.
Obviously, the problem with the public schools isn’t a lack
of money, despite what the teacher’s unions may tell you. The
root of the problems facing public schools today can be found in
two places – the teachers unions themselves, and indifferent
parents.
The teacher’s unions (the NEA and AFT) fight relentlessly
to protect the jobs of incompetent, functionally illiterate
teachers like the ones who failed the Basic Skills test in
Illinois. They demand more teachers and higher salaries (the
more teachers and the higher the salaries, the more dues
collected by the union), but simply making sure the teachers who
are already there are competent would go a long way toward
solving both discipline and academic problems.
Many parents are also partially to blame because they fail to
discipline their children at home. They are ruled by their kids
-- pushed around and forced into submission by tiny tyrants who
demand $300 shoes and belly piercings or they’ll...what,
exactly? Stop liking you? I challenge any parent with a
twelve-year-old brat to deny your child one request and see what
happens. Sure, she’ll hate you (temporarily) – but she’ll
respect you. And you can’t possibly expect her to respect her
teachers if she doesn’t respect you first.
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