OPINION:
Perhaps what’s most distressing about the latest collapse in high school test scores is that no one seems distressed about it.
You’ve probably heard the news that ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year. Our graduation high school seniors are less equipped for a job or college than at any time in three decades. One response has been to dumb down the tests. Another is to abandon testing.
Why isn’t anyone in Washington or anyone in our $800 billion education bureaucracy sounding the alarm and declaring this a national emergency? It certainly puts our national security, our technological superiority, and our economic prosperity in grave danger.
Instead of outrage, it is almost as if Americans have become anesthetized to bad news about our children.
One theory is that Americans feel about their local schools as they do about Congress: They love their own representative but think the rest of the members are corrupt and incompetent. While it is true that schools in high-income areas outperform inner-city schools, almost all public schools are much worse today than in the past.
Yes, there are good public schools across the country and thousands of magnificent teachers. But I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the five wealthiest counties in the country, and we had to pull our children out of the public schools because they were so bad — and because they shut down during COVID-19. I shudder to think what’s going on in the Baltimore schools down the road.
Forty years ago, the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its findings on the state of the schools in its report titled “A Nation at Risk.” Here was the memorable and grim conclusion: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
But the country hasn’t paid attention. Today, mediocrity would be an improvement. If you think I’m blowing one bad report out of proportion, the Nation’s Report Card report that came out earlier this year found similarly dismal student performance in the public schools. Reading and math proficiency collapsed over the past four years, partly because of the teacher unions’ insistence that public schools stay closed during COVID-19 — a national act of child abuse.
The left obsesses about income inequality and the gap between rich and poor, yet liberals are so captive to the teachers unions that they do nothing about what is arguably the most regressive policy in America: our failing public school system.
The decline in test scores is only half the story. The other part of the story is that the biggest declines in learning and achievement are among the poorer families.
I’m the furthest thing from an education expert, but I have had five children. In watching their development, it’s pretty clear that three essential components to an enriching education are (1) discipline in the classroom, (2) high expectations and (3) a classical curriculum. This isn’t that complicated. It’s not like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
These used to be standard fare, but now they are seen as outdated. Today, most public schools fail all three of these standards.
California recently announced it is going to make climate change a standard part of the school curriculum. Really? They are going to scare the bejeezus out of children with a propaganda campaign telling them the world is coming to an end. Why don’t they try phonics so kids can read?
Pitifully, the education establishment has no solution to the education national disaster. When the horrid test score results came out, instead of becoming introspective, they parroted their decades-long trope about more money, more money.
The school blob’s pitiful response to this abject failure to teach is to call for more money. We’ve tried that for 40 years. Per-student spending in the public schools after adjusting for inflation is up 50% in 30 years, which almost entirely inversely correlates with the continual test score slide.
The one glimmer of hope is the burgeoning school choice movement in America, which allows the dollars to follow the students and parents to choose the best schools for their kids — public, private, Christian, Jewish, or whatever works.
The teachers unions argue with a straight face that school vouchers would hurt the public schools. Have they seen the test scores? How could they possibly perform worse?
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is” “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
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