By Alan
Caruba
The 2010
introduction of Common Core, a set of requirements for what elementary and
secondary school children should know in math and English language arts, has
turned schools in one state after another into battlefields as its complexity
and other factors led to protests against it. Even so, by mid-2014, a NBC/Wall
Street Journal poll found that very nearly half of those asked about it hadn’t
even heard of it. A number of states, such as Missouri, Indiana, Oklahoma, and
South Carolina have withdrawn from it.
Schools
today are often under fire for one reason or another. Ever since the 1960s when
teachers unions began to secure more and more control, formerly the
responsibility of individual and state school boards, Americans have been
engaged in efforts to improve the elementary and secondary education systems.
Many have elected to home school their children. Others have pushed for school
choice to permit their children to attend a school that was clearly doing a
better job than the one to which their children were assigned.
As
youngsters settle into their classes, there are a number of trends worth
noting.
Perhaps
one of the most interesting trends is the expansion of online classes into
K-12. As Ashley Bateman noted in a
recent issue of School Reform News,
“In 2013 ten million students of all ages participated in more than 1,200
massive, open, online courses offered by more than 200 universities.” Of value to self-motivated students in
particular, online classes are sure to find a larger audience of students who
have grown up in the virtual world of game playing.
Another
trend was noted by Marcy C. Tillotson, an education reporter for Watchdog.org.
It is the increasing demand for more and more data about each student who worry
that things done at a very young age like a schoolyard fight or emotional
problems will follow them into college when they have long outgrown the
problems or behaviors of childhood. Parents want to know what data is being
collected and who has access to it. As often as not, they cannot find out.
Increasingly,
school choice, a parent’s right to enroll their child in a selected public
school, a private or a parochial choice, has become an issue that makes it into
state legislature’s where some support and some forbid it. In Louisiana and
Texas, for example, school choice programs and scholarship credits have gained
support as a political issue. In Florida, the teachers union has initiated a
lawsuit “to eliminate school choice for many low-income students and
effectively kill a program to help students with autism and other special
needs.” In North Carolina, its Supreme
Court rendered a decision that permits more than 2,000 low-income parents to
send their children to schools of their choice.
Attention
to the quality of teachers, as opposed to letting tenure keep poorly performing
ones in the classroom, is a growing trend. Last year in California, a first of
its kind teacher quality lawsuit was decided in favor of the education reforms
that brought it, striking down tenure and a similar lawsuit has been announced
for New York.
As Ms.
Tillitson reported, “Vergara v.
California struck down state laws that required teacher layoffs based
solely on seniority with no regard to teacher effectiveness, gave teachers
permanent status after two years on the job, and made it difficult for school
administrators to dismiss ineffective teachers.” As this trend expands to other
states, a major complaint regarding poor performance will be addressed.
At the heart
of the issue of teacher quality are the programs that prepare them to teach. As
Ms. Tillotson noted, “A week after a California judge ruled on a case involving
teacher tenure, dismissals and layoffs, the National Council for Teacher
Quality released its annual report on another fundamental problem, the poor
quality of teacher preparation programs. The report found that, as a whole, the
programs need improvement. “Only a quarter of the programs expect aspiring
teachers to be in the top half of their college’s academic pool. On a 125-point
scale, the NCTQ ranked most programs as earning fewer than 50 points.
Increasingly,
the quality and content of various educational programs are being questioned
and challenged. One example is the
College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History Framework (APUSH) and the
questions about who wrote the curriculum that is taught to 500,000 students in
more than 8,000 high schools every year.
When Larry
Krieger, a retired College Board-praised teacher and Jane Robbins, a senior
fellow at The American Principles Project asked the College Board who was the
author or authors of the program, all they got as a reference to a web page
listing 19 college professors and teachers who served on two College Board
committees but where not listed as authors, but as “Acknowledgements.” Kreiger and Robbins call the history program
“biased, poorly written, and ineptly organized”; one that “has raised alarms
from state and national leaders.” We keep hearing about the importance of
“transparency” but apparently the College Board does not think it applies to
them.
It has
long been known that U.S. schools tend to perform more poorly than those in
other nations. Joy Pullman, a research fellow of The Heartland Institute and
managing editor of School Reform News
reported that “According to two recently released studies, the schools
middle-income families send their kids to are not as good as parents
think.”
“A
national study,” wrote Ms. Pullman, “found U.S. students whose parents have
college degrees perform worse than peers from comparable families in other
countries. In the United States, 43 percent of such children tested
‘proficient’ in math on an international test, compared to 71 percent of
comparable students from Poland, 68 percent in Japan, and 64 percent in
Germany.” Overall, U.S. students performed better than those in only six
countries.
Not
surprisingly, Ms. Bateman has reported that “Accepting federal mandates in
exchange for funding is the crux of the problem” of ever-growing educational
bureaucracies at the state level. “States report that 40 percent of the
paperwork burden they deal with is to comply with federal regulations,” said
Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage
Foundation.
When one
considers how much in tax revenue is collected for the purpose of educating our
youth, one would hope for better results, but fortunately there are many
individuals, parents, and organizations seeking to improve the quality of
education and our schools are going to remain battlefields for many years to
come.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
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