George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 September 2015.]
Those who pay attention know that today we are a divided and divisive nation. And we can’t blame it all on the usual partisanship that makes its appearance during election seasons, which always serve to pour salt into already open wounds. Over the last week I was struck by California’s standardized test scores, and the efforts parents have to mount to get their children an education from our public schools.
The results are in from elementary, middle, and high school grade levels, telling parents and teachers how well the kids learned in the new Common Core curriculum environment. And the results are not pretty. Statewide over 55% of our students don’t meet grade level literacy standards, and two out of three don’t meet the math standards. Worse yet, almost three out of four 11th graders fail to meet the math standards – these are the same young people who want to enter college or the workforce. Nevada County’s performance pretty much mirrors statewide scores; we are hugging the lowest quartile when compared to other counties. (more here)
A more rigorous condemnation of our public schools’ failures is hard to imagine, but the efforts of Mr Alfonso Flores of Anaheim, a parent, teacher, and decorated war veteran, illuminate how firmly are the mechanisms of failure baked into our public schools. The problem, of course, starts and ends with teachers unions which have fought tooth and nail every effort to improve our kids’ education. Mr Flores has been a leader in using the state’s ‘parent trigger’ law, passed in 2010, to replace incompetent teachers and school administrators. The nationally reported experiences he relates about how teachers unions hobble the proper functioning of schools would curl your toes the wrong way.
Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal reports (here) that “during his military service, Mr. Flores was struck by his fellow soldiers’ deficient educations. They had to “redo grammar school” because they “couldn’t write a simple report,” … “The Pentagon has complained about high-school kids not able to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.” The short of that is, forget the workforce, our kids are even too ignorant to be trained to serve in our all-volunteer military. The scores I previously cited explain why.
The national ‘dumbth’ which Steve Allen observed decades ago has gotten no better over the intervening years as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics. Over this interval the cry from the public education industry has been a constant ‘give us more money, and be patient’. The question today’s parents and taxpayers ask is ‘what has 40 years of more money and patience provided America’s young who now make up the third generation graduating from public schools which no longer work in the modern technology-driven world?’
But the dumbth problem goes even deeper than that, and threatens the very fabric of our civil society. We are an innumerate people with little or no ability to understand the media, think critically, comprehend numbers or any numerical relationships, logic is beyond us, graphically presented information fools us. And it is hopeless for us to follow a structured conversation or debate – all we can do is focus on the one-liners or clever gotchas.
When we hear that candidate Bernie Sanders’ touted programs require an added $18T of spending or of Donald Trump’s promised Mexican border fence, we cannot factor such reports into the larger picture of the possible ways it may affect our country and our lives. Since so many of us cannot discover and think for ourselves, we must look to some national talking head or political demagogue to reduce things down to bite-sized opinions which we can then call our own. In other words, in the aggregate our schools have made us a malleable and manipulated citizenry whose friends, foes, and polarizing beliefs are manufactured by money and the media.
When America was founded, Thomas Jefferson warned us that ‘a nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’ Today we witness the wisdom of his words.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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