As you know, I have been following the question of learning loss. Children across America were deprived of their access to school during the pandemic. Some were not, but many were. And, of course, those parents who were trying to supervise their children's Zoom calls discovered that teaching was substandard.
Parents across America are now pulling their children out of public schools, to homeschool or to send them to private schools. As it happens, California is leading the way. Unfortunately, poor parents do not have this option. They cannot but feed their children to the public schools, become a giant Moloch.
A nation that is normalizing the bodily mutilation of children will surely have no problem with mutilating their minds.
Yesterday, Bari Weiss reported that:
… 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.
And then there is inner city Baltimore where the vast majority of children cannot do grade level math:
Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level.
49% of students "are performing below grade level in at least one academic subject", according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics School Pulse Panel. This number has rocketed higher from its 36% average prior to the pandemic.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the teachers’ unions are producing a permanent underclass, a group that will have no other recourse than crime and gang violence.
And then, we have the words of famed black novelist Walter Mosley:
We’re living in a dumbed-down culture because the education of most people in America is sad and not useful. There are people who don’t know how to spell, they don’t know how to think. They don’t even teach kids how to deal with money in school — the one thing you think they would teach in America.
When you consider America’s ability to compete in the world markets, keep these facts in mind.
Well, given that the USA seems intent on starting a war with China as well as the current proxy war with Russia, given these educational attainment levels, who is going to be able to operate all that high-tech stuff the military prides itself on?
ReplyDeleteWhat is the percentage of the population that is fit for service, again?
Terrible. But the decline began with Obama's gift to the publishing world, Common Core. I've been teaching for a very long time, after homeschooling my own children, and if one teaches faithfully what is put out currently by school text book companies, one's students will be, how shall I say...morons? I have fourth graders that struggle with basic subtraction. No one knows the rules of phonics. The words "parts of speech" are a foreign language. I would love to go into details. And I could! But it would take PAGES! Needless to say, I am not faithful to my textbooks, and work to find alternate sources. Memoria Press is a good place to start.
ReplyDeleteI won't hold my breath waiting for a reporter to ask Randi Weingarten about those statistics.
ReplyDeleteMost of the engineers and physicists that put men on the moon learned arithmetic first from women. Before feminism, smart women became teachers, not lawyers and doctors, and they and society benefited from it. They had intellectually challenging family friendly jobs that had them home in time to make dinner. Society got smart teachers.