The Poor Performance of Education in the United States

Forget Critical Race Theory. U.S. Public Schools are an abject failure. In spite of more and more money, results have not improved. 

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation. Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744..., an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian. ...The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards... Backers argued...the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon's "Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." ...Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards. "I worry that by adopting this bill, we're giving up on our kids," House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said.

I don't know which part of the story is more reprehensible. Should we be more outraged that state politicians want to eliminate standards, or should we be more outraged that supporters are implicitly (at the very least) racist in thinking that minority students can't perform?

This is equivalent to breaking your bathroom scale because you don't like your weight.

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. …The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, …follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers. …Low-performing students have been the focus of decades of bipartisan education overhaul efforts, costing many billions of dollars, that have resulted in a string of national programs — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, the Every Student Succeeds Act — but uneven results.

By the way, we haven’t had a “decades-long effort to raise standards.”

What we really had is a decades-long effort to appease teacher unions by pouring more money into the existing school monopoly.

That was the real purpose of failed schemes like Bush’s No Child Left Behind (I call it No Bureaucrat Left Behind) and Obama’s Common Core.

The real problem is the structure of our education system. We have a very inefficient monopoly that has been captured by the teacher unions, which means mediocre results.

It doesn’t matter that most teachers are well meaning and it doesn’t matter that most parents are well meaning. Until we replace the monopoly with school choice, things won’t get any better.

And the woke crowd doesn't make it any better. 

Ethan Chaplin, a Glen Meadow Middle School student, told News 12 last week that while he was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on in math class, a student who bullied him earlier in the day yelled "He's making gun motions, send him to juvie." He was suspended for two days and then underwent five hours of a physical and mental exam at Riverview Medical Center's crisis unit, his father told NJ.com.

Meet 8-year-old Asher Palmer, who was tossed out of his special-needs Manhattan school for threatening other kids with a toy “gun’’ — which he made out of rolled-up paper. ...[His mom] was incensed that Principal Micaela Bracamonte told other staffers in an email that Asher “had a model for physically aggressive behavior in his immediate family.’’ Spadone thinks Bracamonte was referring to her husband because he served in the military during the Kuwait war. If that was the reason for the comment, she said, “I find it offensive and inappropriate.’’ As far as the toy gun is concerned, she said Asher, a first-year student, made it out of a piece of paper after discussing military weapons with his dad.

This is not an isolated incident. 

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.

Seems like the United States wins this contest for government stupidity.

Glad I graduated High School in 1970.