By Patrick J. Buchanan
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.
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First of all, Pat, if you think I’m hogging your site, let me know and I’ll back off.
Anyway, back to the topic: You know, until Barack Obama was elected, Black and Hispanic students often felt that there was no hope for them beyond low level jobs. There developed in their communities the idea that the white man’s education system was some kind of a voodoo plan to take away their souls. This was especially true in the Black community. Hispanics, on the other hand, often scored low because of the language difference. Not that Asians and other immigrants don’t have a language difference, but for Hispanics, it’s easy to tell yourself that someday you’ll probably move back to your homeland (this is a crude simplification, I know). It’s only been a few months since Obama took over, so I think we should wait awhile before we decide that we need to give up on trying to equalize education scores. Already, I see a change in attitudes amongst the minority kids. I truly believe that this new attitude will translate into more effective learning, if of course discipline is reintroduced into the schools. If we can get past the idea that disciplining minority kids is racist, then schools can once again become places where kids can learn.
Agreed, a student shouldn’t be allowed into study program until it’s smart enough to be there and learn.
Notes From Peyton Place
What a great title for this article; “Dumbo University.” I laughed out loud when I saw it.
As for the idea that kids should be disciplined in school, I am all for that, although I think it is really the job of the parents in a uniculture–not a “multicultural” cesspit.
My parents were teachers and so is my unmarried senior citizen “wife.”
Given that, NOT all families are equal either. I am thinking in particular of the Muslim family, which punishes the child for attempting to fit-in to the host culture. The form of familial discipline exerted is murder, plain and simple.
My wife has related to me how the baboons she attempts to teach make her life hell-on-earth, as a substitute art teacher. They are rude and disrespectful, and simply have no class, unless it be an underclass.
No wonder Anglo-Saxons gravitate to white enclaves! Who wants to live with a bunch of miscreants who throw boulders at one another in the parking lot?
“Birds of a feather flock together.” It may be a trite saying, but it is the truth.
My stepmother was a high school principal, and had to call the cops every day, to manage the rock apes at her inner city school.
When I was a young student, I noticed that while I was attempting to maintain my grade point average, in order to qualify for college, the Mexicans were going around in gangs, intent on shaking down their “fellow students” for their coats and lunch money. They were natural-born banditos and bullies. Recently, I was informed by a new acquaintance– through a mutual friend–that the leader of that gang which terrorized all the white kids, ended up as a long-term “corrections client” in state prison.
The Marxist bastions passing for centers of higher learning, in this day-and-age, more resemble prison yard theaters, than institutions of higher learning and crucibles of liberty.
Another glaring example of what happens when the white man is absent as a stabilizing force, is the spectacle of violent partition India and Pakistan provided the world, after British colonial rule ended.
While American blacks were complaining about racist oppression–which they may have had a point in stating–their brothers back in Africa were carving one another ups with machetes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Congo. Idi Amin Dada–The Butcher of Uganda,” was no Abe Lincoln either.
Things got rather hot, under Ol’ Pol Pot, after the French ended their colonial rule of Indo-China.
I might like to mention the 38 million-man Mexican occupation army, which voted with their feet to trudge North, for the superior administration of the white man. They couln’t fathom revolution or change in their own country, but opted to descend on America instead, as thieving scarecrows.
Gee, I hope that wasn’t too “politically incorrect.” God forbid someone should speak the truth.
The article also presented some interesting and historical information regarding Spiro Agnew.
Its good that you are speaking the truth, however you are wrong about the India-Pakistan comment. It was in fact the British who has destabilized that region and brought for the first time poverty to them. The British has always utilized “Divide and Rule”. And as we know the “fruits of intervention” are sour and its hard to anything about that now. But this was besides the point you were making.
It’s worse than you know. I teach at an elite private university. We recently started to require that our students take a basic grammar exam in order to qualify for our department. This is a very simple exam for anyone over the age of 40 — basic noun/verb stuff. However, we’re seeing failure rates of 50 percent or more on the first attempt. As a result, we have to place a large portion of our university students, all of whom have 1000+ SAT scores, in a remedial (read here, 7th grade) grammar class so that they can develop basic skills.
Of course, we would never even consider booting substandard students. Universities that used to pride themselves on weeding out students who were “not college material” now boast of their ability to get those same students a degree. Indeed, many college ranking systems, including the one used by U.S. News & World Report, include “Retention Rate” as a positive for colleges and universities. So now, keeping substandard students not only brings financial benefits to institutions of higher learning, it also improves their reputations.
What a topsy turvy world we have created for ourselves.
Pat:
I’ve thoroughly enojoyed all you’ve offered on your site (most of which I read from Human Events) over the years. I am a first-time poster.
Being a conservative and a public school teacher can on occasion present its challenges, but usually staying professional keeps things on good terms. Folks just want the job done.
I do, however, have to take exception with your characterization of students in regard to musical ability and band. Yes, I am the director of bands at my high school. I know it’s a small element of your article, but one I cannot avoid addressing. You state “…there are many kids who do not have… the musical ability to play in a high school band” as if this is an assumed truth. It is not.
Now, in nearly 20 years of teaching, I’ve heard all the jokes and stereotypes about the proverbial band geek and squawking marching band. Largely, those stereotypes exist because there’s a strain of truth in them. My own colleagues have often perpetuated them. It wouldn’t be a funny joke if those strains of truth didn’t exist.
That being said, I’m going to stake my entire professional reputation on one point: Every child can be successful in band.
Now, we do need to recognize that some non-mainstream students may have disabilities that even prevent participation, or prevent results that you or I would care to listen to. Nonetheless, within the mainstream student, my program can, and does, make every single student a successful performer that you would be interested in hearing play, regardless of aptitude.
Sure, certain innate qualities in some students lend themselves to being musically excellent much faster and on higher levels than others. Mostly, though, music is a skill, and proper exercise and development in those skills will create, at minimum, passable musicianship in every child. Every single one.
Wheras a person such as myself may not be able to play football due to the genetic lottery of a small and lanky frame, music is a human quality that is with us since birth. It’s a language everyone understands even before mastery of the spoken word.
Unlike the other elements you listed in the paragraph above, every single child can reach an acceptable level of mastery on a band instrument.
If every student isn’t succeeding in your band program, then you need to examine the teacher, or look at the resources being provided to that department. While I know that may read like me saying “more money,” what I have experienced is that many school systems relegate their band programs to 2nd or 3rd class status and then wonder why that one director with ancient equipment can’t make all the kids, 6-12, sound good.
Sorry to blather, but my point is thus: Every single child can be successful in band. And I mean successful enough for any layman to appreciate.
I am one of those professors that routinely teach non-credited mathematics courses at several southern New Jersey colleges. Tonight, I am teaching a class called “Intro to College Math” which is really 5-6 th grade arithmetic. It’s not “college math” at all. It obvious that colleges are made to do the job that our k-12 grades are not doing as we have “permissive” education (freedom not to learn) to go with “permissive” parenting (freedom to disobey parents).
Mike D’Antonio
Hi Everyone
This is a brief commentary about the latest Buchanan article. Read his article attached inline below first.
As someone who worked at CUNY – Hostos and found out the hard way, about the consequences of getting on the wrong side of entrenched factions, corrupt managers, student thugs and crooked union officials, I welcome this article even though I probably don’t agree with some of its author’s “possible” motives.
AS a CUNY alumnus (CCNY class of 94) I am increasingly angered to see that the people in charge of CUNY have created and expanded upon a disaster of this magnitude. Under their tutelage CUNY has become an academic and political cesspool that now stands dangerously close to being labeled a diploma mill – a death sentence for any university.
Worst of all, open admissions, normally the easy target for every low brow racist and bigot, is now being brought up by a man who should know better, as the culprit for every evil that afflicts CUNY. I think Pat Buchanan, a fellow Catholic and a man with whom I agree with on a lot of key issues except immigration, owes it to himself to take a deeper look at this mess, and consider that open admissions was intended to be a right to a try out, not a right to continued enrollment and certainly not a right to a diploma.
Had open admissions been handled properly, the unprepared would have been filtered out and sent back to adult HS or the factory floor, usually in the first or second semester, while those who met the high standard would have been rewarded with an additional tuition free semester at a premium quality CUNY institution, and would have had a continued chance to eventually join an august body of CUNY alumni in the highest strata of American professional life.
It was the arrogance of big time government spenders and the demands of CUNY bottom liners, short termers and community factionalists, that turned open admissions into the disaster CUNY has today.
Of course, an even deeper look would reveal a class of freshmen who stand a good chance of being the product of an NYC K-12 school system that abandoned children a long long time ago. But that’s another story. And as with present day CUNY it’s a study of the interaction between incompetence and criminality.
Javier
Pat, Please Read this.
You assume that a child ability to perform in school is innate and that test scores reflect this inherent gift. Tests scores do reflect something, and its not your genetic lottery ticket, your ethnicity, or your gender. It’s your economic background. There are two possible explanations for this correlation. The first is that people of lower economic status are generally less intelligent, and their children inherit their abilities or the lack thereof. However, if we accept this hypothesis, then we also must assume that Hispanics and Blacks are, as a group, less gifted than whites because they are generally poorer. The second hypothesis is that children of lower economic classes come from homes where parents are less educated and less skilled, and they are unlikely or unable to help their children with their schooling or otherwise invest the time and resources in extracurricular activities and tutors. Furthermore, there is also a correlation between low economic status and adverse family life, meaning children of lesser economic backgrounds are more likely to come from troubled homes ( statistically, divorce is actually not a factor in this correlation ).
The second explanation has been strongly supported with studies that track adopted children who were biologically born to mothers who were unskilled, uneducated and poor, but were adopted by upper middle class families. The results show that the adopted children perform averagely in the early years, but they surpass their peers as they get older. It is not the school that does that trick – It is their parents.
Thus, test scores reflect a child’s parenting, not their genetic lottery ticket, and in that vein, schools reflect communities much more than they shape them. Sure there are exceptions at the extreme ends of the bell curve, but even the most talented of children will under-perform at school if he or she does not have support at home, and even the best trained teacher cannot compensate for a troubled family life. Kids’ performance in school is a strong indicator of the their parents’ investment in their education. To improve tests scores, we must start at home.
There are some school models which have attempted to overcome this achievement gap by keeping kids in school many more hours. In essence the school, compensates for what is not happening at home. As far as I understand, children of these schools perform quite well regardless of their background, but they are in school almost the entire year and over 8 hours per day.
Vocational education in secondary schools is an entirely different approach – perhaps more pragmatic but less idealistic. This could potentially solve some social problems by giving teenagers skills so that they could be productive out of highschool; however, the political climate does not favor that outcome at the moment.
Pat has a point but the examples are awful.
CUNY was great in the 50’s because smart Jewish kids couldn’t get into Harvard, Yale or Stanford because of money or quotas limiting the number of Jews admitted. Now they can.
Test scores topped off in the 60’s because the teachers were women who couldn’t go into law, medicine, or investment banking. Now they can.
Sorry, Pat, you can’t go back to the 50’s.
Mr Buchanan, please convert .6732 into a fraction.
Thanks.
Well, since he never answered, trivially, its 6732/10,000 . You can reduce by a factor of two 3366/5000, and another factor of two 1683/2500. That is as far as you can go. But don’t ask me, I never graduated high school.
There’s a complication to this issue. Though blacks are less intelligent than whites, whites are less intelligent than Jews. If Buchanan believes that blacks should expect and make do with less, Jews feel the same way about whites. Jews look upon whites the way whites look upon blacks. Even as blacks underperform vis-a-vis whites, Jews outperform the whites.
There is a further problem: Jews and blacks, though at extreme opposites of the IQ scale, are political allies. Why? There is the victimhood theme in both black and Jewish narratives. But, Jews also want to use blacks as a political weapon to morally de-legitimize whites(who happen to be the most powerful rival to the Jews).
So, the issue of black and Hispanic underperformance is only one side of the larger problem. The other problem is Jewish overperformance. Since Jews outperform us and have more money and influence, they get to decide educational policy. Jews have chosen egalitarianism because affirmative action is much more likely to hurt white gentiles than Jews. Firemen like Frank Ricci are affected more than multi-millionaire Jewish lawyers or financiers.
What about Chinese? How do their IQ’s rate compared to those of Jews, Whites, and Blacks?
I think the Chinese are the standard everyone else measures to.
Linda, post my message. Don’t cower before the cabal.
I am a former regular (not special education) teacher in NYC public high schools. The poor performance of NYC’s regular students is not because excessive academic demands are made upon them, as you seem to imply in your column. The public schools in New York City operate on a two-tier basis: there are good schools and bad schools. It is the bad schools that fail to properly educate students.
In good schools, high demands are placed on teachers and students. A teacher who is not considered effective by the principal is given unsatisfactory ratings and threatened with disciplinary charges. Most teachers with unsatisfactory observation reports transfer to less demanding schools. In egregious cases, a teacher will be terminated. Students are also not allowed to misbehave and cut classes in good schools. Such students are suspended and transferred to alternative learning centers or bad schools that tolerate misbehavior.
In the bad school I taught at, students were allowed to cut class as much as they liked. First period classes were mostly empty because students would come to school late. In high school, it is important for students to go to every class because the day’s lesson depend on knowing what was taught in the previous lesson. In 1995, I testified to the New York State Education Department about the poor discipline in my school. You can read my testimony at
http://www.dkroemer.com/page68/page68.html