OPINION:
Our nation’s schools are in crisis. Too many high school and college graduates can’t think or do. They are the victims of a culture of mediocrity created by elected officials, education colleges, teachers unions, university presidents and school principals.
The first thing to get straight is that the pandemic shutdowns and remote learning did damage, but student performance was already poor and trending down.
According to the ACT, 43% of 2023 high graduates class lack competency for college work in reading, English, mathematics and science. Only 21% meet that benchmark in all four.
Those lacking competency were 36% in 2019 and 31% in 2014.
Not everyone needs to become an engineer or financier, but scores for reading and English competency fell from 64% and 44% in 2014 to 51% and 40% in 2023.
Those numbers are hardly stellar. Yet high schools are reporting record high numbers of graduates because accountability has been gutted.
In 2012, 25 states, enrolling 70% of America’s public school students, required state achievement exams to receive a diploma. In 2023, only eight states did. And of those, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts are considering dropping tests.
The problem runs back to elementary schools. The early literacy scores attained by first graders each spring have fallen, and scores for reading and mathematics have slipped for fourth and eighth graders.
Colleges have to work with the students that high schools send. Through a career spanning 47 years, I learned that colleges vary standards to keep up enrollment. Consequently, employers complain that recent graduates lack what all educated people should have: the ability to look at a body of facts or data and come to a reasoned conclusion.
New mechanical engineering graduates can’t design a metal part to be fashioned on a lathe — a skill expected to be attained by the second year of college.
Remote learning at the height of the pandemic was a problem, but students continued not to show up at school.
In public schools, chronic absenteeism — students missing at least 10% of school days — remained elevated when schools reopened from pandemic shutdowns owing to health concerns but continued at terribly high levels in 2022-2023 in inner cities and affluent suburbs alike.
Schools are not adequately enforcing state attendance laws. In the work-from-home culture, too many parents fail to see the necessity of children attending school every day. Not enough schools condition participation in clubs, sports and other activities on good attendance or assign grades as they should.
It’s tough for successful adults to remember that children often go to school more to socialize than to learn. Once there, educators can still help students achieve some progress. But if parents let their children stay home on the slightest excuse, many will. Then, children can chat with friends all day, if permitted or unsupervised, with smartphones and tablets.
Obsession with cultural issues takes up energy at all levels. Educators and parents only have so many resources, and if there are no consequences for children not learning, the students get diplomas anyway and go to some college.
Where they can spend too much time obsessing about gender pronouns, microaggression and cisheterosexism — behavior that upholds heterosexuality and two sexes as normal and neutral and oppressing LGBTQ people — but don’t learn that Hamas murdering, raping and taking innocent women and children hostage is an atrocity regardless of context.
All this got Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin elected and, along with homelessness, crime and inflation, has put former President Donald Trump ahead of President Biden in the polls. But the former president’s ambitious program to squash “wokeism” from Washington will make his second term as much of a failure as his first.
The culture of mediocrity and prejudice that has captured progressive politicians, schools and universities can be altered by demand-side incentives.
States should require eighth grade competency exams for students to enter high school, and for high school and college students to pass competency exams to obtain diplomas.
Fire principals and presidents whose students don’t pass and offer individual student scores to prospective employers. Then let’s see how much time teachers and professors spend preaching critical race theory, decolonization and social justice.
Nothing focuses the mind like a public hanging or, in this more genteel age, getting fired for incompetence.
Require that students obtain passing grades in at least three of the four REMS (reading, English, mathematics and science) to qualify for federally sponsored college loans. Deny access to student loans to any college with freshman classes with fewer than 80% of its students having passed the ACT, or a comparable national competency exam, in all four.
Finally, Mr. Trump’s idea for a national teacher certification that must be honored by the states makes sense. If states want to certify cultural ideologues, then facing the above requirements, principals will give preference to federally certified teachers over those with state credentials.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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