Random Nuclear Strikes

Otherwise I’m gonna be right down to touching my brain.

You see, everytime some doomsday report comes out about “Is are childran lerning?”, the left points towards Bush and/or the Republican Party for blame-laying.

And so it goes with Nicole at the left-wing C&L blog after this story in AM NewYork

Twelth-graders’ reading skills have hit a new low, but their grades continue to climb, according to federal officials who suspect the nation’s schools are inflating grades.

Suspicions that teens’ rising grade-point averages may be unmerited are fueled by two new national reports released yesterday at a Washington, D.C., news conference. Both reports are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a U.S.-sponsored program that tests representative samples of students in academic subjects.

According to one report, the latest nationwide test results in 12th-grade reading have hit their lowest point since testing in that subject first began. On average, students nationwide scored 286 on a scale of zero to 500 during the last round of tests in 2005 — down one point from 2002 and six points from the first year, 1992.

Federal authorities say they can’t be sure whether this reflects a conscious effort by schools to puff students’ achievements, or whether it may involve other factors as well, such as teacher inexperience in grading.

Unfortunately for Nicole’s hemmoraging BDS, other than major items like “NCLB”, which has shown more successes than failures, everything involving the education, with the exception of fed funding, of children starts with the states and then works its way down to the teachers, which bounces it back to the state teachers unions and finaly to the NEA.

It is not the need to standardize a system of finding out where a student’s learning needs are that is the problem, it is the fact that more time in the classroom is spent on “issues” than on “instruction”.

I’ve written here before that in my recent high school years, I was given more “time to explore” than I was “time to listen”. My teachers would basically let the class run itself, with lesson plans right out of the Wizard of Oz. My Honors English class was, quite literally, a series of lists of sci-fan and/or social commentary books followed by book reports.

Honors History meant that we got to listen to the “socially aware” chuckleheads bitch about how evil America was because the teacher was into “free-form learning”.

I sucked at math, but that didn’t stop the district from stuffing me into ever-more-demanding forms of alphabet-soup math. And because high school has to be as painful as possible, for three years straight, I was stuck with the same Australian “Exchange Teacher” who only knew how to teach Chemistry (which I also sucked at) but doubled as a higher math teacher.

And that was my “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Science” (RWAS) education. It was accompanied by three other hours of wasted time per day, consisting of learning another language (I always thought that kids should master their native one before learning how to butcher another), art classes (because art school twerps need an A on their report card too) and some real burned off time in a shop class (applied electronics: how many times can hit you with 220V before you sustain damage?) or gym (ping pong, weightlifting and running around the gymnasium) or sociology/psychology pop science of the day (no need to stick with the established facts) or the eternally interrupted by adolescent laughter class: Health (bathe and brush regularly, farts are natural and tab A goes into slot B).

The classes listed in that last paragraphs were all mandatory. The only “elective” was which variations you were going to take that year.

To top that list of time wasting activities off, every 2-3 weeks, we’d have to break from getting schooled to attend an “Assembly” on one socially insipid topic or another. As it got closer to the end of the school year, the frequency of the asseblies would increase as the administration realized that they’d be losing up for three whole months.

If the NEA and left-wing wannabe pro-education types were serious about getting kids learning something meaningful, they’d demand that the extra-curricular shit listed above be dropped for serious learning topics. Doubling up on RWAS would be a good first start. Making the kids read historical tomes could even double as “Reading”. Giving the schools some backbone to take care of the unruly students and making “Detention” an actual punishment would be a good follow up.

Frankly, I wished my parents had sued for their tax money back, because they, and I, got ripped off.