Killing Fields

You teach a child to read,
and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test
--George W. Bush
_______________

Amidst the current electioneering, one topic which seems to get short shrift is the U.S. public education system. The Bush boys' "No Child Left Behind (NCLB)" initiative has been a spectacular failure.

It degrades the teacher, handcuffing him or her to a system which allows little room for creativity. It demands the proverbial "teaching to a test," which pleases only the teachers who find comfort in rote recitation.

The students are placed in a nearly constant state of anxiety, as they now know they are part of a herd, which will be thinned via failure if they fail to tick off the state-mandated road markers. Analytical thinking is not as prized as rote memorization and drill.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of a national report, "Nation at Risk," which warned in 1983 about the deteriorating state of public schools. Today, our society is showing the returns on roughly 40 years of failed academic experiments, first committed in the name of raising student's self-esteem (letting students find their "own their voice," no matter how pitiful the grammar with which they expressed it), now in the name of raising the state's self-esteem (or more correctly, ability to earn funds.)

The problem is heartbreaking, and maybe even nation-breaking. But for those who will fill the nation's boots, higher thinking may not be a priority.

In an insidious aside, the Air Force recently said their slick ad campaign was really aimed more at adults, who might then speak with the younger generation about the service. And next week we've got a "BG from the Pentagon" coming right here to River City. Gonna visit one of our toughest high schools next Tuesday to give ROTC members a pep talk. 10:1 the talk is not going to be about book learnin'.

There is no formula for creating an excellent teacher, nor an excellent student. It has something to do with preparation and care, and outside support.

Students do not arrive at school in a vacuum. Social milieu matters. It is a far different thing to walk to school past armed guards and through a metal detector than it is to pass smiling moms volunteering with coffee dollies, two extremes in our town. The high school the BG will be visiting is one of the former (surprised?) No coffee for him, but maybe a Coke from the padlocked vending machine.

The Head Start program helps mitigate the disparity, and it is a crying shame that such programs are continually nickled and dimed while there is always money for the killing business.

in "Education Lessons We Left Behind," George Will quotes Chester Finn, author of, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik", who says NCLB "got things backward":

"'The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best.' Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier."

Bob Herbert also wrote an excellent piece on the topic, "Clueless in America," in which he says,

"Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education."

A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

He ends saying, "We've got work to do." But that work does not seem to be prized nor prioritized. There are educational initiatives in place, such as Americorps and Teach for America, but these programs which could actually do some good always get the short end of the funding stick.

Working in an urban classroom must not be as romantic as fighting halfway across the world.