No Child Left Where?
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How is this possible?
First and foremost, schools must eradicate the scourge of "social promotion." It does neither students nor society any good to create socially-accepted illiterates.
Second, all bilingual education must end. Teach English as a Second Language to be sure. But every study and anecdote shows that total immersion is the only effective way to learn a language. And of course the wholesale child abuse of bringing Ebonics into the classroom must also end.
Third, make the teachers unions accept their fair share of the blame.
Fourth, vouchers would be nice.
The sole argument for public elementary and secondary education is that there are substantial positive externalities to having a universally-educated populace. So what happens to that rationalization when schools aren't actually creating such a populace?
I thought it was the libertarians who went around "shrugging" all the time — not the educrats. Go figure.
ACT's data available here.
Other thoughts at Atlantic Blog.
Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.I guarantee you private high schools are not contributing to these shortfalls. If they did, then the government (not to mention tuition-paying parents) would swarm down on them like a plague of flaming hail. But public schools always seem to get a bye, No Child Left Behind notwithstanding.
The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.
"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.
First and foremost, schools must eradicate the scourge of "social promotion." It does neither students nor society any good to create socially-accepted illiterates.
Second, all bilingual education must end. Teach English as a Second Language to be sure. But every study and anecdote shows that total immersion is the only effective way to learn a language. And of course the wholesale child abuse of bringing Ebonics into the classroom must also end.
Third, make the teachers unions accept their fair share of the blame.
Fourth, vouchers would be nice.
The sole argument for public elementary and secondary education is that there are substantial positive externalities to having a universally-educated populace. So what happens to that rationalization when schools aren't actually creating such a populace?
I thought it was the libertarians who went around "shrugging" all the time — not the educrats. Go figure.
ACT's data available here.
Other thoughts at Atlantic Blog.
Posted by KipEsquire on
17 August 2005
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