Dumbo Univeristy
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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As George W. Bush famously asked, “Is our children learning?”
Apparently not in the twin capitals of liberalism, D.C. and New York.
In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York City just a tad less.
And the bountiful fruits of this massive transfer of taxpayers’ wealth?
In D.C., nearly half of all black and Latino students drop out. Of those who graduate, nearly half are reading and doing math at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels. D.C. academic achievement ranks 51st, last in the U.S.
Yet last week came a report from New York that makes D.C look like M.I.T. Some 200 students, in their first math class at City University of New York, were tested on their basic math skills.
Ninety percent could not do basic algebra. One-third could not convert a decimal into a fraction.
If this was a representative sampling, nine in 10 CUNY students not only do not belong in college, they do not qualify for their high school diplomas. As for that third who can’t do decimals and fractions, they should not have been allowed into high school until they could do sixth-grade math.
As 70 percent of all CUNY students are graduates of city schools, a question arises: What are the taxpayers of New York getting for the highest tax rates in the nation?
If a private business annually turned out products that were of inferior quality than the year before, management would be thrown out by the board. Yet, the education racket has been shaking us down for four decades, and turning out graduates that know less and less.
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked around 1964. Ever since, the national average has been in an almost unbroken descent.
So embarrassing did it get that, a few years ago, the SAT folks retooled the test to produce higher scores. Now there are more 1600s. But the national average continues its decline, and the gap between blacks and Hispanics, and Asians and whites, endures.
Is it not a time for truth?
Just as there are many kids who do not have the athletic ability to play high school sports, or the musical ability to play in a high school band, or the verbal ability to recite poetry well or star in debate, not every kid has the academic ability to do high school work.
By the end of the first two months in first grade, an alert kid can tell you who are the smart ones and who are the athletes.
No two kids were ever created equal—not even identical twins. The family is the incubator of inequality, and God is its author. As the parable teaches, each of us is given different and unequal talents.
Given equality of opportunity, the brightest will inexorably rise, and the less talented—athletically, artistically, academically—will fall behind. All things being equal, the fastest kid will always win the race.
This campaign to equalize test scores among unequal students is utopian and unattainable, and amounts to a scam by the education industry.
How many times have they promised progress? And how many times have they delivered?
It is time to look not only skeptically, but cynically, on further demands for billions for education.
Rather, follow the money. Look for who is getting the jobs, the TV appearances, the consulting contracts, the grants, the titles, the limo drivers. Because, at bottom, that is what it is all about—the transfer of wealth and power from those who earn it and those who produce it, to those who produce little or nothing.
The city colleges, now the City University of New York, were once municipal jewels. They nourished an intellectual elite from the ethnic groups that came in the great immigration wave before 1924. As open admissions—letting in every high school graduate in the city who applied—was being debated, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew weighed in against.
“If these quality colleges are degraded, it would be a permanent and tragic loss to the poor and middle class of New York, who cannot afford to establish their sons and daughters on the Charles River or Cayuga Lake. New York will have traded away one of the intellectual assets of the Western world for a four-year community college and a hundred thousand devalued diplomas.”
Agnew quoted historian Dan Boorstin:
“In the university, all men are not equal. Those better endowed or better equipped intellectually must be preferred in admission, and preferred in recognition. . . . If we give in to the . . . demands of militants to admit persons to the university because of their race, their poverty, their illiteracy or any other nonintellectual distinction, our universities can no longer serve all of us or any of us.”
The limousine liberals knew better.
Now, they have CUNY students who can’t handle fractions.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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1 Comment by Andrew Stanton on 20 November 2009:
The quality of the students emerging from a school is overwhelmingly determined by the quality of the students entering. All the money in the world can’t change that but we have an elite that insists otherwise both for ideological and pecuniary reasons. The sad thing is how compliant the victims i.e. parents and taxpayers are.
2 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 20 November 2009:
However, the Deweyite and Gramscian missions proceed. The children are still molded to accept the left-wing world view. Millions of willing cogs abound the high schools and colleges. Clients for the therapeutic state are still being forged by the tens of millions. The kids are given self-esteem. They still recite Mr. Bellamy’s glorious Pledge of Allegiance. Sean Hannity would be proud.
3 Comment by Bernie on 20 November 2009:
I assume the mispelling, “Univeristy” in the title is intentional. But given the nature of Pat’s column, it might have been made clearer.
4 Comment by Gordon Porter on 20 November 2009:
“In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York City just a tad less.”
Good heavens, is the state really spending $14,100 in taxpayer dollars per pupil? It is absolutely absurd for the state to spend more money per student than what the average cost for sending them to a private high school would be, yet they yield such inferior results.
Could this in part be due to many private schools harboring a Christ centered learning environment, while at the same time God has seemingly been dethroned in our nation’s public schools?
5 Comment by John Seiler on 20 November 2009:
Conservatives wasted 40 years trying to “reform” education. Remember Reagan in 1980 promising to “abolish” the Department of Education (De-Ed)? Or De-Ed Boss Bill “Virtue” Bennett saying, “I’ll bet you 10-1 that I reform education”?
It was all a joke that made a lot of money for those on the inside, like Bennett. Worse, the emphasis on “standards” meant that even private and parochial schools switched to government-school “academic” programs so the parents would feel good.
The only real reform of education is the abolition of all government schools and all truancy laws.
6 Comment by Adam Bazemore on 20 November 2009:
The quality of the student and the student’s parents will determine their success in school, not the amount of money thrown at them. The reason Southern state schools lag behind the rest of the country is never admitted by educators or politicians. The reason is the same as D.C. and NYC. It is the large proportion of blacks in the school system. The vast majority of black students do not have a father to discipline them, provide economic security, and motivate them to succeed. As long as black culture is plagued with this fatal sin, they will remain impoverished, uneducated, and will bring the academic rankings down in the states and cities they inhabit. Perhaps, the less they learn in government schools the better.
7 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 22 November 2009:
When people choose to home school the most frequent question they hear is,”How will your children be socialized?”
Totallt illegitimate government schools are in the business of churning out millions of socialists, which must be the definition of “education.” Most teens I meet today who have half a brain are reading as a means of rebellion.
8 Comment by Mark Schaeber on 22 November 2009:
I can name several ways to raise student achievement by a good 50 %, without even trying.
1) Allow schools to expel the 10 % of chronic troublemakers that waste teaching time for the other 90 % of students. Have them go to “alternative schools” to learn how to pick crops, sweep streets and similar menial tasks. Hire them out to local farmers/DPW agencies/etc. to actually perform services instead of consuming tax dollars.
2) Cut educational spending (particularly at the college level) by 50 %. Weed out all the “administrators” in charge of preserving Sacred Diversity, non-academic frivolities like interscholastic athletics (intramurals are fine), GLBT “societies”, “ethnic clubs” and the like. Return K-12 schools to their core function of teaching knowledge and useful skills—period.
3) Break up the teachers’ unions. If teacher-militants want to be treated like “professionals”, then let them act like “professionals”. (When was the last time anyone ever heard of a doctors’ or lawyers’ union ?) Renegotiate salaries and benefits to levels in line with local private-sector firms.
4) Abolish “departments of education” at all institutions of higher education. Require that prospective teachers have a degree in their field and a “minor” in education. The education “minor” should be along the lines for the curriculum of the old “normal schools”. Get rid of graduate-degree requirements for a teaching certificate; most such programs are exercises in inanity that actually subtract from the sum total of Human knowledge with each class session attended.
Or we could just send the heads of the NEA and the collective professoriate of “education schools” to interment camps, where they could be retrained to do simple but useful tasks like cleaning out sewers, changing bedpans in hospitals and serving food. Socially useful and tax-saving at the same time—what’s not to like ?
9 Comment by David Collins on 23 November 2009:
“(When was the last time anyone ever heard of a doctors’ or lawyers’ union?)”
Two acronyms: AMA, ABA.
10 Comment by David on 23 November 2009:
And, end the oxymoronic Department of Education. Then, end the public education system altogether, replacing it with privately initiated and locally controlled system. This would be the beginning of the counter revolutionary “long march” through the institutions. We can use Gramscian methodology for our own purposes. (One recalls the boast of, I think, Daniel Cohn-Bendit [sp?], in France in the late ’60s, to the effect that in twenty years or so “we shall be teaching your children and grand children.” How prescient that boast was. Professor Polin can attest to this, to be sure.)
11 Comment by AWLC on 23 November 2009:
@9
As a physician, I can state with certainty that the AMA does not look out for doctors’ interests nor does it speak for me and my colleagues. It is rotten to the core with liberals and socialists, men and women who long ago abandoned practicing medicine and now deign to tell others how they should do so.
I believe that only 15% of physicians belong to the AMA. The rest of us hold it in utter contempt.
12 Comment by Matt on 26 November 2009:
Here in Cleveland, teachers, especially white woman teachers, are frequently attacked by their black students. The previous school superintendent had, as part of her contract,clause whereby she was flown to her home in Washington, DC or New York on the weekends, on a private jet.