Public schools not making the grade
I’m sure by now that everyone has seen Miss South Carolina’s interesting response to her question in the Miss Teen USA Pageant. But just in case you are one of the six that have missed it, here’s her question: “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?” Miss South Carolina, Lauren Upton’s, response, “I personally believe that us Americans are unable to do so because uh some people out there in our nation don’t have maps. And uh I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for.”
It’s fun to see that on TV eight times a day, and sure I laugh every single time I see it. But I’ve recently learned some very disturbing facts. She actually graduated from high school. Much like myself, a public high school at that. So I’m thinking that she probably barely skated by, maybe got by with a 1.8 GPA or something. But the scary part is that she did better then that, much better. Upton finished near the top of her high school class with a 3.5 GPA. She was an Honor Student.
Clearly our government run schools are failing students. Of course, they’re not failing students by actually failing them, but in the case of Upton, failing them by passing them with flying colors. Many school districts around the nation have done away with grades for elementary school children because a bad grade might make the child feel bad. And with the extreme number of government regulated tests that students must take over the course of any given year, it’s no surprise that America is constantly failing academically when compared to other industrialized nations.
Perhaps the problem with American public schools isn’t too little government intervention, but too much. No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s education plan has been a horrible misjudgement. This policy will fail a school for having less than a high preset level of attendance. It is obviously ridiculous to punish teachers and school administrators because a student gets mono and has to miss an entire quarter. Likewise, this terrible policy also creates more standardized tests for the students to take, and requires improvements in the passing rate every single year. There are two obvious problems with this. First of all, if 100 percent of your students pass the test one year, how are you supposed to improve on that? And secondly, if you’re always testing your students with these standardized tests then when are they supposed to learn the stuff that the tests ask them?
What many Americans fail to realize is that education has gone sharply downhill since the creation of the federal Department of Education in the 1970s. For 200 years, American students were being taught by schools paid for and provided by their local community and state. But recently the federal government has hijacked these schools by giving them money and then setting their own arbitrary standards for what they feel children should be learning. Some of the lessons that come out of this could be the idea that America is great because of our government. Nothing could be farther from the truth. America is great because of our strong, fiercely individualistic spirit, which drives us be the most free people on Earth.
In the 1990s, President Clinton, and members of Congress, were shocked at how poorly students in the Washington D.C. area were doing. So they decided to pump money into the school systems to the tune of $10,000 per student per year. The end result was that these schools continued to perform just as poorly as they did before, and continued to do much worse than private schools in the area where student’s tuition was less than the money pumped into the public schools. Money can’t buy love, and it obviously can’t buy a good education from the government.
Interestingly enough, Karl Marx wrote in the “Communist Manifesto” that one of the ten prerequisites for communism to form is a government run public school system. This way students can be brain-washed into believing what their government tells them … and even tests them on. Republicans and Democrats and most all American political parties talk about the poor performance of our schools and they propose solutions that would involve more government. What they fail to realize is that the only rational solution would be to either return schools to their localities or to privatize them completely.
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Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Sep 6 2007. Filed under Opinion.
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