Some simple questions:
- How is it possible that after a hundred years of free public education forty-three million adults are illiterate?
- The Los Angeles Unified School District managed to graduate 78.1% of its students in 2019 despite:
- Only 32% of fourth graders could read to their grade level
- Only 10% of blacks and 19% of Hispanics in eighth grade could read at their level
- What are taxpayers getting when they spend $20,000/student (California) and over $25,000/student (New York).
Remember, we are talking about human lives; those children who graduate and who are not able to adequately read, write, or do math are going to lead disappointing and bleak lives. They are condemned to a life that is more difficult and less rewarding, a life with fewer options and opportunities.
It is not bad enough that we have a federal department of education which has received and spent over a trillion dollars since founded and has not produced any improvement in the educational output of the nation. After the pandemic, additional billions of dollars were pledged over the next several years to “improve” education when there seems to be no correlation between money spend and results.
The link below will take you to a story of a valiant man who is standing against one of the pillars of the broken educational system, the 310,000 members of the California Teachers Association. His goal is to have a California Constitutional Amendment which puts the rights of the students first above all other interests. While this is a simple premise, one must remember that the California State Supreme Court has already ruled that there is no Constitutional right in California to a good public education, only a free one. It has gotten so bad that the California state prison system uses educational outcomes to forecasts their future prison capacity needs.
What has been done to our educational system is a moral outrage; how educators and their union can stand by and be part of a system which literally destroys the future lives of millions of children is the ethical question that should be asked in every ethics class in the nation (do we even teach ethics any longer?).
