Spending on public schools in the United States increased 43 percent between 1990 and 2002, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. What exactly are American taxpayers getting for their $420 billion annual investment in public education? Tragically, not smarter kids.
Results from the latest Assessment of Educational Progress — the only test taken by a representative sample of all students across the country — reveal a 7 percent increase over the past decade in the number of high school seniors who can’t read adequately. Incredibly, only a third of our public schools seniors can read well at graduation, despite having spent on average 45 more days in class than they did in 1990. Math results were even worse: Less than a quarter of graduating seniors have basic math skills required to pursue college degrees in science and technology.
It’s been 24 years since the Education Department published “A Nation at Risk,” warning of the then-looming failure of our public schools. Since 1983, education spending has skyrocketed under presidents and congresses controlled by both parties, educators have tried faddish nostrum after nostrum and still two of every three graduates can neither read nor do math well enough to make it in the 21st century. In any other endeavor, such a miserable record of extended failure would result in bankruptcy or prosecution, yet we let it go on in our public schools year after year after year.
How much longer will we do this to our children?
Members of Congress should remember these facts asthey debate reauthorizing the five-year-old “No Child Left Behind Act” this year. They should resist attempts to water down the law’s requirement that underperforming schools demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” toward achieving full grade-level proficiency by 2014 for 95 percent of all students. But some school districts in Virginia are now defying federal officials over whether to give immigrant students the same proficiency tests as other students, as the law requires.
School boards in Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William counties have already passed resolutions saying they will not comply; Alexandria and Manassas may do so. At stake is $29.9 million in federal aid and another $2 million in state funds. Local educators want either different standards or an exemption from the law because they know poorly prepared immigrant students’ scores will lower their schools’ overall academic achievement ratings. The students aren’t the problem, however, the educators who loathe genuine accountability are.
A 15-state study by George Mason University researchers Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas found that immigrants enrolled in two-way immersion programs — with a regular, grade-level curriculum and no translations or repeated lessons in their native language — closed the achievement gap and actually outperformed regular students on standardized tests by the fifth grade, with the added benefit that their English-speaking peers became bilingual as well.
No Child Left Behind should be reauthorized and even toughened. Habitually failing educators with their endless excuses should be left behind.
