Weak U.S. education link

Americans are focused on our relations with China, many fearfully so. Will we able to compete as China continues taking manufacturing jobs from a free-market America?

A recent Senate Finance Committee hearing was held on this subject. The main witness, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, opposed tariffs on Chinese goods, but said little else of substance — except for one telling comment.

In the long run, he accurately pointed out, our economic strength in the world market eventually rests mainly on one factor — brainpower, measured by the quality of our education system. In that race, he emphasized, we are failing badly.

Why is it, Mr. Greenspan asked, that our fourth-grade students are superior in international competition, while our eighth-grade students have proven inferior? Also, why are 12th graders hopeless in the key disciplines of math and science? In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, our high schoolers scored 19th out of 21 countries, beating out only Cyprus and South Africa. They scored 20 percent lower than the Netherlands, a nation that lives on its brainpower — as America might one day have to do.

Asked why our students become more ignorant the longer they stay in our public schools, Mr. Greenspan’s response was typical of America’s uninformed leaders: “I have no idea.”

But for those of us who have studied public education, the answer is clear: Our educators, from teachers through superintendents of schools, are academically and intellectually so inferior that the fourth grade is apparently the outer limit of their teaching abilities. They are so poorly selected, poorly trained and lacking in general intelligence, that failure by our middle- and high-school students is foreordained.

How can we support such a potent indictment? Easily. All standardized exams confirm their shocking inferiority. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test college entrance exams, the average student score is 1026. In affluent areas, the typical score is closer to 1050, or more.

How do our would-be teachers score? Abysmally. Those who intend to teach scored near the bottom, with an SAT score of only 965, lower by 61 points than the average student. The Education Department explains that future teachers typically come from the lower third of their high-school class. Yet they move on to teacher training, generally at low-level teacher’s colleges. Only 1 in 8 teachers have a true liberal arts degree.

Most cannot get into a regular liberal arts college and must be satisfied with training in “education,” which is not a true discipline. That truth was exposed by alternate certification teachers, who generally do better than so-called “qualified” teachers though they have never taken an education course.

The typical education curriculum is no better than that of a two-year community college and filled with generally false psychological instruction (courses such as “Personality and Adjustment”) rather than solid content. Their standards are so base that the head of teacher training at a main Connecticut state college inadvertently volunteered the truth. “Gross,” he said, “you are hung up on knowledge. Knowledge was important when we were a manufacturing society. Now that we are a service society, it is more important to understand how to work with people in groups.”

Defendants of teachers note that their 965 score is only of those who intend to become teachers. What of those who actually became teachers? The story there is even more depressing. On the GRE, the Graduate Record Exam, taken by those seeking a master’s in eight professions, teachers score the lowest, with engineers at the top. The engineers even beat the teachers in the verbal test by 29 points.

Elementary school teachers score near the bottom in the GRE, but principals and superintendents of schools score even lower. Little wonder our children are so ignorant.

More than 100,000 teachers take a master’s in education, but that degree is essentially false. A study of 481 masters in education showed they took 26 more credits in debatable “education” and only nine in the liberal arts. Only 1 in 5 were even required to write a thesis. Hardly masters of anything.

The “doctoral” program, which grants an Ed.D. degree held by most superintendents of schools, is at an equally low level. The educational doctoral program at New York University shows almost no liberal arts courses. Only 1 in 7 education “doctors” hold a true Ph.D. degree. The Ed.D. is purposely simple, yet the title “doctor,” even if not truly earned, impresses most parents.

The educational establishment has created a costly, generally unnecessary army of school bureaucrats. In 1960, there were 96,000. Now there are 215,000. Support troops — reading specialists, guidance counselors, etc. — have grown from 700,000 in 1960 to 2.5 million, with no gain in academic performance.

Story Continues →