School failure, how did we get here? pt 2

     Okay, we are continuing with what happened to our educational system. We have hit the 80's and we're still not seeing the competitive results we aimed for when we began to model our system after the German state-run system at the turn of the century. We're still looking at John Hood's article for thefreemanonline.org, The Failure of American Public Education as our source.
    So we keep hearing the same old arguments as to what needs done to improve our schools, same problems cited. Reduced class size? Done it. Down an average 40 percent between 1955 and 1991. Lack of funding? Nope. Up 350 percent for the same time period, an exception of only two years during that time. Low teacher pay? Nope. Up 45 percent from '61 to '91.
     Personally, I don't feel that any of this has anything to do with the results. The standards for our kids needs to be raised, not lowered, and all this tolerance training, and non-competitiveness is killing our kids' future. No boss is going to give your child a gold star just for showing up for work, and no extra break time for gold stars all week, and yet, this is the mentality they are arriving with at their first jobs! They arrive with entitlement on their brain. As a boss, I don't care what your kid's self-esteem is like. I want to know he can do the job applied for!
     This is what needs to change. We need prizes for performance, both for students and for teachers. Teachers should get better pay - when their students start to perform. Students will start to perform when the teachers earn their pay, compete to have the best students, ones who win scholarships and  science fairs, essay contests - not just memorizing to pass the standardized tests, doing 'just enough' to get by. The numbers are really sickening:

Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other performance measures shows how poorly served America’s public school students really are. Just five percent of 17-year-old high school students in 1988 could read well enough to understand and use information found in technical materials, literary essays, historical documents, and college-level texts. This percentage has been falling since 1971.

Average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores fell 41 points between 1972 and 1991. Apologists for public education argue that such factors as the percentage of minority students taking the SAT can explain this drop. Not true. Scores for whites have dropped. And the number of kids scoring over 600 on the verbal part of the SAT has fallen by 37 percent since 1972, so the overall decline can’t be blamed merely on mediocre students “watering down” the results.

Only six percent of 11th graders in 1986 could solve multi-step math problems and use basic algebra. Sixty percent did not know why The Federalist was written, 75 percent didn’t know when Lincoln was president, and one in five knew what Reconstruction was.

Hood also is right on the money when he talks about how the more we inject  race, socialization, environmentalism, humanism, class, and other social concerns into our schools, the less we are going to see any real progress. If bureaucrats and social interest groups won't get out of the way, then it's time to look at other options.
     Since the eighties, there has been an upward tick of enrollment in private schools and homeschooling, and both have been shown to outperform public schools. Private schooling is not just for the upper or middle class anymore. Most cities have private schools geared toward those of the lower economic status. Homeschooling is also an affordable option, and it engages the parents in their child's school life.
With both of those options becoming more popular among young families, it is enough to make me hopeful for the future a little.