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With school out for summer, now is the time to take stock of the state of our education system.
By any objective measure, our schools are performing only fair or poorly for most kids. Math scores hit a 20-year low. ACT scores fell to a 30-year low last year. In dozens of schools across the country, not a single child is practicing reading, writing, or math at grade-level proficiency. Not a single one!
Part of this poor performance is due to the unforgivable error of closing schools during the COVID-19 outbreak, even though children are not particularly vulnerable to the virus.
But our school was in long-term decline. in front Pandemic.
Eric Hanushek, one of the world’s leading education scholars, recently released a report marking the 40th anniversary of the famous 1983 federal study, “A Nation in Crisis,” which warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had tried to impose on America the mediocre educational performance we have today, we might well have considered it an act of war.”
But sadly, no one listened or heeded the warnings. Unions continued to demand more funding without accountability. Schools were transformed into social service institutions instead of places of learning. So they started to pursue both missions, but fell short. In recent years, educators decided that it was their job to teach about social justice, climate extremism, LGBTQ issues, and “systemic racism.”
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In many public schools, patriotism and love of country have been replaced by a “blame America first” rhetoric, with math, reading and science taking a back seat.
But taxpayer money has flooded in: Adjusted for inflation, per-pupil spending has quadrupled since 1960, Hanushek notes. Since 1980, per-pupil funding has doubled.
The rise of ‘microschools’: Parents choose alternative learning for their children
Yet over the past few decades, there has been little, if any, evidence of improvement. In most school districts, the opposite is true.
The federal government has also pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the country. But there is virtually no evidence that US government spending has added much value; it has mainly just added bureaucracy. Test scores have not changed.
And yet President Joe Biden’s plan would spend hundreds of billions of dollars more, largely because the most powerful force in the modern Democratic Party is the teachers unions — the unions, not the parents.
Arizona needed 7,500 teachers at the start of last school year. (Littleton School District)
After 40 years of failure, parents are finally waking up and taking action. The parental choice movement is gaining momentum, especially in Republican-leaning states. In the past two years, some 13 states have added programs that allow parents to redirect education dollars — giving low-income parents money to send their kids to charter schools, Catholic schools, or other options.
This will hopefully provide incentives for public schools to compete and improve.
One of Hanushek’s main conclusions offers a ray of hope: “There is some evidence that more funding can improve student learning in public schools,” he writes. But, he adds, the funding needs to be tied to “rewards for performance.”
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For example, encouraging teacher excellence through pay-for-performance and abolishing or reforming lifetime employment to weed out bad teachers can improve schools and help children.
The problem is that teachers unions are staunchly opposed to measurements. their Performance. Students’ performance can be assessed, but no one assesses teachers’ performance.
Back in 1983, there were warnings that our schools were mired in a quagmire of “mediocrity.” Now, more than 40 years later, in many cities and states, mediocrity would be a major improvement.
Reform is on the way, but will it happen soon? We can’t wait another 40 years.
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