Dutifully, we’ve reported in recent weeks what some public educators would prefer us to ignore: public schools’ marks are trending lower.
That verdict was proclaimed twice in the span of slightly more than a few days, first by the Texas Education Agency and then by the federal government, which released its annual No Child Left Behind scores.
A question persists. Whom to blame?
School officials generally have chafed at the accountability push substantively initiated under President George W. Bush in 2001. States across the country had begun taking a closer look at public education before then, but No Child gave national life to increased accountability.
Educators responded reflexively and still do. Tap teachers or school officials on the knees and they’ll almost invariably utter something about “teaching to tests.” That, they say, is the product of a system that, thanks to Bush, delineates the efficacy of schools based on students’ performance on narrowly focused standardized tests.
Forgotten in all of this, educators say, is the importance of subjects beyond the three R’s of reading writing and arithmetic, subjects such as history or the arts.
These points are valid. So, too, is another. This country’s academic performance has been tanking for decades. Among 34 developed countries, the United States ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math in a global student assessment released late last year.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan responded with predictable banality. “This is an absolute wake-up call,” Duncan declared. Absolute wake-up calls are perpetually sounding in Washington but no one wakes.
And still, America lags. China, South Korea, Canada and Finland, among others, consistently score higher academically. Almost a decade of No Child has failed to nudge the United States from the ranks of the middling. We hear talk often these days of American exceptionalism. Average is not exceptional.
But some delusions are. The International Math and Science Study once noted, matter-of-factly, that “American students think highly of their skills but perform poorly.”
Those who’ve noticed what’s happening here, or vocationally are forced to do so, have taken to jabbing fingers in opposite directions. School officials and teachers point to parents. Parents point to teachers. And the wound festers.
Federal intervention through No Child has failed to provide a salve. Many educators concede that it has aided in focusing needed attention on the academic performance of minority and poor students. But educators otherwise complain, with cause, that No Child has produced a system of checking boxes rather than building minds.
Its most significant flaw is its most telling, not about the law but about America. No Child, living out a name that reveals much, declares that by 2014 schools are to achieve 100-percent graduation rates. This goal can be realized only through fuzzy math. Otherwise, it’s ludicrous.
Trying to do what can’t be done, and floundering badly, we’ve left someone behind in the conversation about what’s wrong with education in America. What about the kids?
This question is asked often, but never in the right context. Certainly, some parents fail terribly in their responsibilities. Some schools do, too. Changing the latter is difficult. Changing the former, at least in an absolute way, is impossible. But there’s more.
At some point, the kids themselves must shoulder responsibility, certainly not when they’re wandering off to kindergarten for the first time but increasingly as they make strides toward adulthood. While we all reap some benefit, no one does so directly like the children themselves.
Someday, when they enter the work force it will matter to no one the faults of their public education, teachers or parents. Bosses will be unmoved. The failings of today’s kids once they become adults will be entirely their own.
No one aids children by shielding them from this reality for the first 18 or 22 years of their lives, then suddenly casting them to it.
Some children leave themselves behind, just as some people turn to crime, some perhaps as a tragic product of a life of hardships and others for no better reason than they stubbornly insist on making wrong choices. If there were a means of unilaterally circumventing man’s baser proclivities, I suspect we would have found it by now. We haven’t, and we won’t.
What ought to be abundantly clear is that we cannot simply insist on people doing right rather than wrong and make it so. That applies to young people as well as old. Ignoring this, which No Child does, is something close to madness, and it accomplishes virtually nothing.
Lee Wolverton is executive editor of the Globe-News. His email address is email@example.com.