Rumors, Lies, Innuendo, Fear, Uncertainty, and Despair

Raising children is not easy and, as the saying goes, ‘they don’t come with instruction manuals.’

Nonetheless, there are thousands of resources out there on the business of parenting—everything from the durable Dr. Spock to current works on subjects like ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) and autism.

None of the books I read as a parent prepared me, however, for the dramatic decline in the quality of our public school system. I stupidly sent my children into the public schools assuming that the schools were of about the same quality that they had been when I was a child.

This was a mistake. In the years between my graduation from high school and the entry of my eldest into high school the goals, capabilities, and competence of the public school system had declined significantly. By the time I realized how bad the system was, my eldest had graduated with no interest whatsoever in going to college, and my two younger children elected to get the hell out early and take GED’s instead of diplomas.

These three children all had IQ’s in the 130′s and yet were not particularly successful in the public schools.

All three, in my opinion, were bored, traumatized, and poorly served educationally by our public schools. This was not unique to our local school district. As I became aware of the problem and began researching it, the ‘scales were lifted from my eyes.’  I became aware that a primary and secondary education system that was once the envy of the world no longer existed in the United States save for a few anomalous school districts.

It would take a book to detail what has gone wrong with our public schools. At the risk of ignoring significant details and making too-broad generalizations, I will itemize a few of the sea changes that took place in our public schools during the last half of the twentieth century.

Public school teachers are not as intelligent as were their predecessors. Surveys of the various colleges within major universities have consistently shown that students in the colleges of education have the lowest IQ’s and the lowest SAT scores of any college within the university.  Bright individuals, who themselves were good students, do not go into education. Money and opportunity are probably the biggest deterrents to seeking a career in public education.

The decline in the general abilities of public school teachers is tied closely to the expanding horizons for women in the job market. Until about 1970, the two major career opportunities open to intelligent, motivated women were nursing and education. Most other professional fields were often outright hostile to women.  Nursing and education both benefited greatly from this discrimination as they had the inside track on recruiting the best and the brightest from among roughly half the population. Granted, women did not go to college in the numbers they do today (there are now more women than men in US colleges) but there was an ample supply to fill jobs in teaching and nursing with first-rate, competent individuals. This is no longer the case as there are now few professions that are difficult for women to enter.

Schools became centers for social equality and social engineering. Their primary mission, education, was diluted by all sorts of well-meaning but meaningless attempts to insure ‘no child left behind,’ a high school diploma for everyone, and accommodation for the disadvantages and shortcomings of every student. Education has become politicized, placing emphasis on world-saving agendas (every 4th grader knows about global warming). Rather than educate, schools strive to reshape the attitudes of students. Assorted dogmas, including multicultural diversity and “relevance” have been substituted for basic knowledge.

Schools were forced to concentrate on ideas like ‘mainstreaming’ the mentally and physically challenged. Special education programs were forced into every school system by federal funds and federal mandates. Today, it is not unusual for a public school system to pour 40% of its resources into the lowest-performing 10% of its students.

Parents, forced by increasing personal wants and by a more burdensome tax structure, chose to create households where both were generating incomes. They became far too dependent on the school system to provide the kind of support and nurturing that traditionally had come from parents, particularly from mothers. The ‘stay-at-home’ mom virtually disappeared and schools were expected to pick up the slack. Given budgets, class sizes, and the number of hours in a school day, the school systems were unable to rise to this challenge.

The influence of unions increased significantly in the schools. Virtually unheard of in the 1950′s, by 2000 teachers’ unions had become a significant barrier to needed changes in our school systems. The unions made it particularly difficult for school administrators to get rid of incompetent teachers.

The Bottom Line

As I said above, this subject is worthy of a book-length manuscript and, indeed, many have been written. (Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education is a good place to start). But here’s my bottom line:

If you’re planning to have children, plan to pay for their education and send them to a private school that emphasizes basic knowledge and life-long learning skills. If your child comes home with a science project on ‘global warming,’ ask his teacher how a pendulum works. If the teacher can’t answer the question, find another school. The teacher doesn’t know shit about science and is obviously teaching relevance over reality.