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The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released last week were quite distressing. The scores on the reading and math tests administered in October-December 2022 showed the steepest declines ever recorded since the tests were first administered.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), explains,
“The mathematics decline for 13-year-olds was the single largest decline we have observed in the past half a century. The mathematics score for the lowest-performing students has returned to levels last seen in the 1970s, and the reading score for our lowest-performing students was actually lower than it was the very first year these data were collected, in 1971.”
It’s worth noting that the result of the NAEP U.S. history and civics test, also taken in 2022, were no better. According to data released last month, just 13% of eighth graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history, meaning they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Additionally, about 20% of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores represent all-time lows on these two tests.
These dismal results beg the question: “Why is this happening?”
The immediate response is to blame the Covid-induced shutdowns that gripped public education in 2020 and 2021. And to be sure, the hysterical response to COVID did indeed leave scars. In addition, the time spent by many teachers advancing the political fads-du-jour didn’t help things.
But as The 74’s Kevin Mahnken importantly notes, the latest scores, which highlight long-term trends that extend back to the 1970s, “widen the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump.” In doing so, the latest test serves “as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.”
So, what factors other than Covid are dumbing down our students?
Teacher union honchos invariably blame a lack of money. But when you look at the numbers, this is a non-starter. According to NCES data, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending rose from $7,089 in the 1971–72 school year to $17,013 in 2019–20, a whopping 140% increase.
Looking at state-by-state comparisons, we see that Texas – demographically similar to California – spends about 25% less than Golden State, yet its students scored higher on the 2022 eighth-grade NAEP. Similarly, teacher salaries in California are third highest in the country, while Texas comes at number 38 nationally.
Another teacher union mantra is that our classes are too large, and if classes were smaller, students would greatly benefit.
Again, no. Nationally, class size has been shrinking over time. Since 1921, the student-to-teacher ratio has been reduced from 33:1 to 16:1. An extensive analysis of the subject was done by Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek in 1998. He examined 277 different studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement and found that 15% of the studies did show an improvement in achievement, while 72% found no effect at all, and 13% found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way “to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.”
Jaime Escalante’s experience is instructive when examining class size. Probably the most acclaimed teacher of our time, his calculus class was extremely popular at Garfield High in East Los Angeles. In 1983, the number of his students passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled. That year 33 students took the exam, and 30 of them passed.
Going well beyond the 35-student limit set by the teacher union contract, some of his classes had more than 50 supposedly “unteachable” students, and the union, of course, complained. But rather than submit to the union, Escalante moved on to teach elsewhere. Just a few years after his departure, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%.
This leads us to the most likely cause of failing American students: there are too many underperforming teachers in our nation’s classrooms. To be sure, the great majority of our educators range from adequate to good to great. However, as former GE CEO Jack Welch has averred, the bottom 10% of any field should be replaced. In a similar vein, Eric Hanushek asserts that if we just got rid of the bottom performing 5% to 7% of teachers, our education system could rival that of Finland’s world-class system.
In California, there are about 300,000 teachers. If 5% of them aren’t fit to teach, that means we have 15,000 educators who should seek work elsewhere. If each of these teachers has 20 kids in a class, it means they are ruining the educational experience of 300,000 children a year.
And a middle or high school teacher in the bottom 5% can do even more harm, as he or she may have 150 students per year.
But we can’t follow Welch’s or Hanushek’s advice because teacher union-mandated permanence clauses – in place throughout much of the country – make it just about impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. It was revealed during a court case in California in 2012 that, on average, just 2.2 of California’s 300,000 teachers (0.0008%) are dismissed yearly for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance.
Something else worth consideration is that if a district must lay off teachers, it should not be done by seniority or the “last in, first out” regimen that teachers unions demand. This setup rewards teachers for the number of years on the job, irrespective of their effectiveness. Instead, the poorest performers should be the first to go.
Hence, to turn education around, we must change the system. Until teachers are treated as individual professionals instead of interchangeable union members, millions of children will suffer. Educating children should be the top priority for schools, not kowtowing to the teachers unions’ industrial-style work rules. As such, teachers unions must be limited in power or, better yet, eliminated.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
Perhaps another factor for consideration is the deleterious impact of our current top-down curriculum design architecture–essentially the 19th century John Dewey-Max Weber model , or worse, the Soviet GOSPLAN model. How would our students perform if education were open up to the marketplace of ideas, rather than have big-government, big-administration, and big-teachers unions determine what and how students will be educated? Socrates educated students through the Socratic Method (critical thinking). Socrates lived about 2,500 years ago. The world still marvels at his pedagogical system and his educational accomplishments. Socrates and his students did not rely on big bureaucracy, not were they encumbered by it. That should teach us something.
Another factor is the ethnic makeup of America’s students. In the 1970s even California was heavily Anglo. Now 49.3% of children under 18 in America are Hispanic, let alone the other races. So we are really comparing apples to oranges.
Hispanics are not a race and they are barely a cultural, ethnic, group.
“The Bell Curve” argues that Hispanics are less intelligent than whites and Asians because of inferior DNA (as if they actually constituted one gene pool which they do not) and then you look into Jaime Escalante’s brief miracle before his accomplishment was crushed by the public-school bureaucracy.
What made me doubt the honesty of the book “The Bell Curve” is precisely that those two authors treated Hispanics as one gene pool. How can Cubans and Guatemalans be considered one gene pool? Indeed, how can white Cubans and black Cubans be considered one gene pool? If I’m wrong and “The Bell Curve” is right in this presumption, I never found the explanation.
Watch “Stand and Deliver” and then explain to me how the problem is really ethnicity or the gene pool.
From my point of view the problem is that many if not most Hispanics come from a cultural background where education and intellectual pursuits are not understood as crucially important to living a successful life in a modern, technologically, advanced world. Which was also true of most white immigrants to America until they understood differently, i.e., became assimilated. Then they’re children enter a public-school system that doesn’t actually offer an education, they’re children are essentially there for a body count.
The school doesn’t push them, and the parents don’t push them, what other result but failure can be expected?
Once again I must point out that the collapse of academic performance by U.S. students is, as the Marxists say, no accident. As I’ve written before in comments on Frontpage mag, the pedalogical theories of Brazilian communist Paulo Freire have infected all U.S. teachers colleges. As a result, prospective teachers are being instructed that teaching competence in the standard academic subjects simply prepares students to replicate the existing “oppressive” society. Instead, they teach, the classroom should be used to create in students a “critical consciousness” leading them to become activists and revolutionaries. And that’s why Johnny can’t read or do simple math. Do yourselves a favor and buy a copy of James Lindsay’s book, “The Marxification of Education,” available wherever intelligent books are sold. He is the best.
Mr. Lindsay is a treasure trove of knowledge when it comes to exposing how the public school system has been taken over by Marxist activists. The decline in student proficiency is surely no accident when one considers the teachers themselves are not educated but indoctrinated. Public education has gone from being a “labor of love” to an activist movement. If more parents were exposed to the truth Mr. Lindsay tells there’s a chance we could see a return to an actual educational environment. But, as I have lamented here on FPM about several cultural issues plaguing America, where are the parents?
Allowing and even encouraging the youth to leave School Grounds and March through the Streets over this Global Warming/Climate Change Scam just remember the Childs Crusade which lead them all into a Lifetime of Slavery and never see their parents again
Why are we ignoring the elephant in the room? Parents. Too many of today’s parents have been trained to believe that the schools are doing their job. Others treat the school as a baby sitter. As a teacher, I have had many low achieving students (no unintelligent) whose parents are unreachable. If I do contact them, two things usually happen. One, they say the right things but do nothing, or two, they blame the teacher(s).
The other problem is that they have no idea what is taught in the classroom. They assume that the school boards (either elected or appointed) do the right thing. Many times they don’t.
Ooops, speaking of education I used “they’re” instead of “their”. LOL!
“Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.”
I am sooooooooo triggered! All of the desks in the photo reek of right handed supremacy. Such appalling left-handed phobia!