The Looming Educational Crisis

Education has been a heated issue of discussion in our nation, particularly in the last several decades. The definition of education has undergone changes every few years as the focus of society has changed. Once education meant giving our future citizens the ability to decide on critical issues, today the emphasis is to create a sensitive and culturally aware populace that can pass a standardized test. This educational revolution has led to the voucher, home schooling, and charter school counter-revolutions. Parents no longer have faith in the educational system to teach their children even a basic education to prepare them for college. Many parents are disenchanted with a school system that merely gears their children to pass a state-mandated test and neglects other forms and topics of education. It has become obvious that our educational system has largely failed. Unfortunately, what is not obvious is, in spite of this ongoing debate, how will we best educate our future generations to compete in a global society?

Is Standardized Testing a Solution?

In Texas, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test defines the public education agenda. This test evaluates the basic knowledge of Texas public school students. However, the test requires only a score of 50% to gain an "acceptable" (passing) rating, arguably failing to prepare students sufficiently for the rigors of a college education. As reported in the San Antonio Express-News(1), the Texas Education Agency (TEA) uses the results of these tests to rank school districts and the schools within them. Due to scoring errors, TEA rated Steele High School "Academically Unacceptable", but later amended that rating to "Academically Acceptable" once the error was rectified.

Situations like this demonstrate the unreliability of such a measure of educational achievement by schools and their districts. Unfortunately, due to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), every state is now required to use a similar evaluation system to gauge their success. Not only are clerical errors such as the previous situation a concern, but far too many districts are focused on test results, arguably to the detriment of a quality education(2). A common criticism of this new system is that educators are forced to "teach to the test" in order to ensure that the school does not fail its federal standards.

This is a carrot-and-stick inducement, which is short on the carrot, but heavy on the stick. After all if the federal government is threatening to take away federal funding from failing schools, but equally unwilling to provide support to increase performance, the outcome is obvious. Educators and school administrators are being coerced into ensuring that students pass their federally mandated tests to the exclusion of any other educational priorities. Of course, this doesn't take into account students failing these tests on purpose (as some are wont to do) or otherwise not being adequately prepared that day to succeed on such tests (for example if they have been sick, etc). Finally, the use of standardized tests also fails to take into account those students who traditionally under-perform on such diagnostic measures, but may successfully demonstrate their academic ability through other methods.

On a national level, educators and parents largely view NCLB as unfair. A recent report from South Carolina demonstrates that NCLB federal evaluations have an all or nothing approach to achieving those federal standards(3). In Utah, several schools failed to meet the educational achievement measures for Hispanic and Limited English Proficient (LEP) students(4). NCLB has 17 federal measures while the annual Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report has 40 evaluation categories that each school must attain in order to receive a passing grade from the federal government. However, if a school misses even one of these federal measures, the result is a failing grade overall.

The question we must ask ourselves in all of this is whether we are helping our future generation by rigorously testing them with standardized tests. Are standardized tests a reliable measure of educational achievement? Can we use standardized tests to evaluate appropriately the success of a public educational institution? In any event, Congress created NCLB to address the problem of low national educational achievement of our next generation. However, is it proper to assume that a lack of rigorous testing from an early age is the cause of this problem? Does such testing truly address the problem we have identified?

What is the Problem?

I assert that the cause of the problem is the fact that we do not know the cause of the problem. In other words, politics plays an incredibly detrimental role in this debate as it detracts from the real problem. We as a nation have spent far too long debating what our children should learn that public education has become a Frankenstein's monster composed of civics, diversity, multiculturalism, evolution, creationism, liberalism, and conservatism. It should be no wonder that our children do not possess the skills requisite to succeed in higher education as we have neglected the very skills they need, such as critical thought, logical ability, and the ability to apply their knowledge. Instead, we view our educators inloco parentis, ceding our responsibility as parents; relying on them to teach as well as instill values in our children. The cause of low educational achievement on a national level is attributable to all of these issues.

Many educational reformers have presented their ideas over the past two centuries as to how we can best educate our children. I have found that my ideas are not new, in fact, a great majority of my reforms have been put forward by John Dewey previously. I will talk more about John Dewey and his educational reforms in the second chapter.

Unfortunately, in the last half century, and in the last two decades in particular, there has been an ongoing battle between leftist and rightist educational reformers with our children stuck in the middle of the war zone. Each side wishes to present their own interpretation of science and sociology as well as how best to deal with sexual education and other highly controversial issues. However, why have we as a nation relied on our educators in this capacity? Would you let a stranger tell your child how to approach sex? Would you allow a stranger to attempt to instill lifelong values in your child? Essentially, so long as parents are not intimately involved with the education of their children, our educators are those strangers teaching our children concepts that we may find objectionable.

This is not to suggest that all educators have an agenda they wish to impose on your children, rather, I am willing to bet that a vast majority seek only to impart specific knowledge on a given subject to your children and leave the values judgments and moral education to parents. Unfortunately, there are those educators at all levels of the educational system who seek to undermine the core beliefs a family may have cultivated in their child. They may even go so far as to arbitrarily punish and humiliate your child for holding to their values. This type of behavior in any educator should be dealt with swiftly and decidedly. Of course, such a reaction would require a higher level of involvement and participation on the part of the educational consumers.

Failing Globally

The severity of this issue is clear; we as a nation ranked 18^th place out of 24 nations measured by UNICEF in 2003(5). In a global economy that is increasingly focused on math and science skills, we are quickly falling behind nations like China and India(6). Likewise, students are failing to retain even a basic civic awareness through their educational experience(7). These lower achievement results are prevalent in our nation. Eight of the 44 participating states remain below the basic achievement standards at the 4^th grade level, while 13 of 44 remain below those basic standards at the 8^th grade level according to the 2005 Science Assessment from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)(8).

This issue will clearly have an impact on our nation as a whole and every one of us individually. The ultimate result of these failings is a future generation unprepared to lead in tomorrow's global society. This will affect the world of commerce, politics, science, and even education itself as the students leaving such a system will be tomorrow's teachers, thus compounding the issue. We may very well lose our status as a world super power due to losing a war not of weapons, but of ideas.

It might be argued that the crisis point has already come and gone with this issue. We might look back no more than a decade ago to see the results: outsourcing, downsizing, "dot com" bubble burst, and unemployment. However, simply because one crisis has already passed does not mean that there isn't another one coming.

"Dumbing down America" is an apt phrase to describe this system where we will likely have to rely on private school graduates and foreign born citizens to lead our nation, as they (presumably, though immeasurably) receive a better education than public school students. Perhaps that is the ultimate goal of this system: to rely on the private world, outsource all fields, and abolish one of the fundamental public institutions in our nation from the inside. A nation as rich as ours without a quality public education is the true crisis looming on the horizon.

"Dumbocracy"

We stand poised at the precipice as a nation. We can continue to support a failing educational system that does not adequately prepare our children to succeed in college, let alone decide on matters critical to our nation. Our autocratic educational system only serves to stifle the natural drive of human beings to seek out knowledge and discover truth. Through such critical inquiry, we are better able to navigate the murky waters of our political world and consider alternatives to our current course.

Unfortunately, we have created a society that largely views issues in black and white terms. You are blue or red, pro-life or pro-choice, patriotic or un-American. Very few things in life are easily divided in such a dichotomy. Because of this new American thinking, we have degraded our national dialog to the level of the sound bite. Political discourse has devolved to the level of partisan banter. Americans are less prepared to separate the wheat from the chaff in this brave new world of the flashy 24-hour news cycle.

Whether inadvertently or intentionally, so long as politicians design and direct our educational system, standards have steadily decreased and political apathy has increased. Political debate is no longer based on rational and logical discourse, but rather, is framed in emotional ways, eliciting a heated response and pandering to the basest fears and desires of human beings.

However, we can work to reverse this trend. We can wrest the power over education from the hands of politicians and bureaucrats and place it back in the hands of the educational consumer. Nevertheless, this power is paired with a tremendous responsibility on the part of the educational consumer to also play an active role in the educational policymaking process. Without that participation, the system will merely revert to the control of those who only claim to have the best interests of your children and the nation in mind.

Question them on this point at every opportunity. If they truly had your child's interests in mind, or were concerned about the future of this nation, why then do they allow political bickering to reduce our nation's ability to compete on the global stage? Why do they allow ideology, inefficiency, and incompetence to run rampant through our educational institutions? Why are educational consumers covertly or even overtly prevented from even a fundamental participation in the policy process of our educational institutions? These are important questions that demand answers from those who claim to support education in America.

To reiterate, the framing of the educational issue completely fails to point out the root cause: the politics. Until we remove idealism from public education and introduce a pragmatic approach, we will fail every successive generation to pass through its halls. Measuring the achievement of our students with standardized tests only shows how much we are failing and does nothing to address the problem.

Parents who waive their responsibility to participate in their child's education also play a detrimental role in this issue. This issue must be framed as one of personal responsibility on the part of the child and the parent, and social responsibility on the part of our nation to address this issue collectively, as we are all educational consumers. A populace with a quality education with high achievement standards will only serve to protect our competitive standing on the world stage and promote social prosperity and critical evaluation of the world around us.

SOURCES:

(1) San Antonio Express-News, Steele High's rating raised to acceptable, 10/20/2006

(2) San Antonio Express-News, SA schools win accountability appeals, 10/13/2006

(3) WYFF4 Greenville , Most S.C. Schools Miss Federal Standards, 10/09/2006

(4) Ogden Standard-Examiner, 3 Ogden schools face NCLB sanctions, 10/04/2006

(5) Kapi'o Newspress, US falls in education rank compared to other countries, 10/04/2005

(6) Action Institute, Why Johnny Can't Compete with Sanjay, 02/01/2006

(7) Heritage Foundation, US Higher Education: Pay More, Learn Less, 10/14/2006

(8) http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/science_2005