OPINION:
Thomas Sowell, the American economist, educator and social commentator, has written, “If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion.”
Unfortunately, his quote sums up the state of American education. A recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report documents how the lowest-performing students are falling further and further behind their higher-performing peers.
Why is this happening? Because America’s educational system is fundamentally broken.
In our 2019 book, “American Restoration: How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation,” my co-author Craig Osten and I wrote: “One of the few areas in present American culture where much of the political Left and Right agree is that our public educational system is broken. While the sides have different solutions for solving the problems they perceive, the bottom line is there is an increasing consensus that the state of education in America is a mess.”
In 2016, the left-leaning Center for American Progress found that many students with high school diplomas were not prepared for higher education, as 20% of first-year college students must take some remedial courses.
They concluded, “In other words, a large percentage of students land a high school diploma that is basically meaningless. The document might indicate that the students are ready for college, but in reality, the students simply do not have the necessary skills or knowledge.”
The bottom line is that, regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum, America’s children are paying the price as they enter adulthood. In our inner cities, where many of the lowest-performing students reside, they are trapped in a vicious generational cycle of poverty and despair.
Earlier this month, Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times wrote about these distressing results, documenting how initial gains made by low-performing students in the early 2000s have now, over the past dozen years, gone in the opposite direction.
She comments: “Today, the country’s lowest-scoring students are in free fall.”
The result is little or no hope for these students’ success. America is suffering economically, as our workforce cannot keep pace with better-educated students from other countries.
It is not just low-performing students who continue to struggle. According to NAEP, even scores for higher-performing students have dropped.
So, why are American students falling further behind?
Smartphones are definitely a factor, as they have become essential for even those on the lowest rung of the economic scale to function in society. Numerous studies have shown their negative effects on the cognitive abilities of all members of American society, particularly adolescents and young adults, since their introduction nearly 20 years ago.
This is not surprising. As children, Mr. Craig and I were voracious readers and engaged in numerous activities and social connections that sharpened, rather than dulled, our thinking skills.
I would suggest that the No. 1 factor is that we as a nation have lost the purpose of education and instead have focused on everything in the classroom but teaching students how to learn.
Education aims to teach young minds to think, read, write, reason, imagine and argue with excellence. It is about empowering young people to reach their fullest potential rather than trying to just get them through a school day to get a piece of paper.
Instead, our students are treated like guinea pigs to test unproven learning theories and implement liberal social engineering. This mindset has also led to a massive educational bureaucracy that goes through taxpayer money like an alcoholic on a massive bender.
Finally, many of the lower-performing students come from fragmented homes, sometimes with little or no relationship with either a father or a mother, and suffer as a result. Parental involvement and encouragement, as numerous studies have shown, are key to academic success. The most important teacher is often a parent; when a parent is missing, so is a key part of a child’s educational and social development.
If we are to fix America’s educational free fall, especially among our lowest-performing students, we must start with rebuilding American families, get back to teaching basics rather than abstract theories, and focus funding on achieving student outcomes rather than padding educational bureaucracies. All the money in the world cannot repair a broken educational or familial system that serves no one, especially those at the beginning of life.
• Tim Goeglein is vice president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.
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