The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

According to a 2013 CBS report, “Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.” It’s cute they used the term “relearn,” as if this is a memory problem and not a failure in education. At the same time, the New York City Department of Education reported raising graduation rates by forty percent over the last seven years. Sure, lower the standards and presto: better results!

In the 2016 World Economic Forum
Global Competitiveness Report, US edu-
cation didn’t even rank in the top eleven
worldwide. The latest (2015) Pisa study
by the Paris-based Organization for Eco-
nomic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) assigned the US twenty-fifth
place, down nine positions from their 2010
findings, when observing student per-
formance in math, science, and reading.
This places America’s public schools well
behind Estonia and Slovenia, among oth-
ers, despite our government spending 31%
more than the average, according to the
National Center for Education Statistics.
Reported spending for elementary and
secondary education at the state level was
$235 billion in 2009-2010, although the
“average real per-pupil spending figure of
over $12,200 is 49 percent higher than the
$8,200 the districts claim to spend.”
These glaringly grave results intensify
against a backdrop of rising violence in our
public schools. Assaults on teachers in St.
Paul, Minnesota, tripled in 2015. Accord-
ing to Education Week, teachers’ unions in
Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and
Indianapolis have all lodged complaints
about the new anti-discipline philosophy
called “restorative justice,” which, as it is
practiced in Seattle, results in students be-
ing returned to class without suffering any
consequences, after cursing at teachers and
physically assaulting them.

What a deal, right? Greater expense,
worse scholarship results, and increased
violence . . . congratulations, John Q Pub-
lic, you are officially the victim of the big-
gest Ponzi scheme ever. Well, you and your
children. Ponzi and Madoff only pilfered
people’s hard-earned savings. Our public
education system is scandalously squan-
dering the fortunes and futures of the next
several generations.
The bungling education bureaucracy
has explicitly imposed nine overhauls of
the public education system in the past
twenty-nine years. The most compre-
hensive revamping, Common Core, is an
untested, uninspired, non-curriculum,
“standards” application that purports to
solve all kinds of issues while offering ab-
solutely no proof that it can. (It cannot.)
Common Core proponents scurrilously
and incongruously defend it as the stan-
dardization of our education. (I mean, who
doesn’t want their child to be common?)