Education: Good, Bad, But Mostly Ugly
Some discouraging news on the education front today, and I would argue a priori that most of this is due to the ravages of the Covid Regime lockdowns and shutdowns of the government schools.
College Admission Test Scores Drop to Lowest Level in 30 Years, Media Rushes to Blame COVID
They’re talking about the ACT test. The author of this article argues that blaming this on the Covid Regime is a bit of a cop out—that this is the end result of longterm systemic breakdown. He specifically points to the teachers unions, but he does also grant that none of the causal factors are mutually exclusive. Anyway:
NARRATIVE: Many in the so-called "mainstream" media rushed to blame the decline in ACT scores on... wait for it... the COVID-19 pandemic.
REALITY: Given the hellbent drive in public school systems across America to lower educational expectations of students, with STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — minimum graduation requirements being lowered, or eliminated entirely, is it any wonder?
…
While ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a press release that the decline can’t be blamed exclusively on learning disruptions from online learning and missed classes when schools were locked down during the pandemic, she also claimed that “longtime systemic failures” were “exacerbated by the pandemic.”
The second story I’ll cite actually lends credence to both sides of the argument:
ARCHDIOCESE OF CHICAGO STUDENTS THRIVE. CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS STUDENTS STRUGGLE.
But nearly 3,000 low-income students enrolled in Chicago’s parochial schools will lose their scholarships if the Invest in Kids Act is not extended by state lawmakers this fall.
I’ll simply quote the bare comparative stats:
Just 20% of third through eighth graders in Chicago Public Schools could read at grade level and 15% perform math proficiently in 2022.
In the Archdiocese of Chicago, 72% of its students are at or above grade level in reading and 63% could perform math proficiently, according to its 2021-2022 progress report.
Chicago Public Reading: 20% Math: 15%
Catholic Chicago Reading: 72% Math: 63%
IL State Reading: 30% Math: 26%
National Reading: 51% Math: 47%
On the one hand, the Catholic schools hold to higher standards and have no unions. On the other hand, the Catholic schools remained open—no “remote learning”—throughout the Covid Regime.
The worrying part of this is that the teachers union is more powerful than ever, and failure breeds failure.
My son is applying to graduate programs in biology. I was utterly dismayed to find out that almost no one is requiring the GRE (grad school equivalent of the ACT) for admission. I also hear the LSAT is no longer a thing for law school. A friend of mine tells me that courses at his son’s medical school are being taught pass/fail. We are quickly descending from mediocrity to sheer incompetence.
The Texas Special Session dealing with School Choice shows the level of desire for change by a significant segment of the population, but the likely result will leave untold thousands of students in very poor schools.
It is time to take a big picture look at what an ideal public education system should look like. It should not look like the monopolized politicized mess it has become.
Instead of pouring money from a variety of sources into local monopolies and hoping for good results, the ideal system would be funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Provision of educational services should look like what the demonopolized telecommunications industry has become, large intensively competitive high tech providers. These providers would be competing to offer educational services that worked, and that parents and students wanted
This ideal system would protect its users from poor teaching performance. If a student failed to exhibit minimum educational achievement, payment would not be made. Instead, it would accrue in the student account, providing twice the amount the next year to the provider who could catch the student up.
Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
The funds would remain in the student account indefinitely, allowing dropouts to get an education as age and experience created the desire. The endowment would also provide funding for prison schooling, attracting providers who would adapt to the requirements.
Home schoolers whose students exhibited the required achievement would be paid.
The Texas Education Agency has long experience in testing. It would manage the new endowment system, handling achievement testing and payout operations.
Special needs students would still receive extra funding but at an individual level.
Opening educational services to the free market would allow for practical job-related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fought for market share.
Competition among educational providers would make full use of technology, would provide useful training for actual jobs, and would deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification would keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can't touch. The use of AI would allow the tracking of each bit of knowledge and understanding to be monitored at the individual student level and presented in various ways until understood.
The late 1970's in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time.