George Rebane

“New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.”  So opens a front page report in today’s (18aug10) WSJ.  ACT scores for high school graduates have been below acceptable levels for decades and have been dropping in recent years.

I have worried RR readers extensively on the portents of this persistent spread of national “dumbth” (a la Steve Allen).  We have already transited to an information and service economy, manufacturing forms an ever shrinking part of our employment base.  But where will we get such qualified workers when our schools continue to pump out graduates 40% of whom cannot understand what is on their diploma.

In this decade we are well on our way to half of our workforce (now over 155 million) not being able to sell their labor at wages that will maintain their quality of life.  The government continues to be the employer of last resort, and also the funder of last resort to organizations (e.g. NGOs) filled with people who will not make it in the private sector.  And this cohort of ‘workers’ is expected to enjoy robust growth in the coming decade as the planned increase of government takes effect under already passed and planned federal legislation.

States are also doing their part in vacuuming up the unemployables by passing their own regulatory mandates (e.g. California's AB32) that require private sector hiring of such people into subsidized jobs, and then more of them as government monitors to watch over the workers.  Such is the hope and price for social stability in the coming years.  You can guess how well that will work in this age of globalization.

Jack Jennings of the non-partisan Center on Educational Policy states, “High schools are the downfall American school reform.”, and goes on to say “… if our kids aren’t dropping out physically, they’re dropping out mentally.”  One cause of that has been that unshakable pillar of American education, the union-coddled incompetent and/or ineffective classroom teacher.  These people have been demanding and getting ever higher compensation packages for turning out a national product of consistently poor quality.  They and the system that fields them have failed in their commission.

All the while this has been going on, a parallel and energetic effort by our elected political hacks to constrain and eliminate parental choice in educating their children has kept pace.  Stepping back and looking at this national tragedy unfolding forces the conclusion that it just doesn’t make any sense.  Who could possibly benefit from this?

But if we insist that such foolishness would not endure unless it did benefit someone, we come to the obvious conclusion.  The only segment of our society that gains from all this is the political ruling class that must count on a growing population of ignorant, poor, and compliant voters to keep them in power.  November cometh.