Florida's school year has already started early, so its students will
have more preparation before the state-mandated tests that will be administered
to them later in the school year. Meanwhile, there is much wringing of hands and
gnashing of teeth because so much classroom time is spent "teaching to the test"
as our "educators" put it.
Unfortunately, most of the people who call themselves educators have not
been doing much educating over the past few decades, as shown by American
students repeatedly coming in at or near the bottom on international tests. That
is why some states are trying to force teachers to teach academic material by
testing their students on such material, instead of relying on the inflated
grades and high "self-esteem" that our schools have been producing, instead of
knowledge and skills.
While our students spend about as much time in school as students in Europe
or Asia, a higher percentage of other students' time is spent learning academic
subjects, while our students' time is spent on all sorts of nonacademic projects
and activities.
Those who want to keep on indulging in popular educational fads that are
failing to produce academic competence fight bitterly against having to "teach
to the test." It will stifle "creativity," they complain. The author of a recent
feature article in the New York Times Magazine declares that "genuinely great
teaching — the sort of thing Socrates and his spiritual descendants have
delivered" will be discouraged by having to "stuff our charges with information"
in order to pass tests.
If there has actually been such "genuinely great teaching," then why has
there been no speck of evidence of it during all these years of low test scores
and employer complaints about semiliterate young people applying for jobs? Why
do American students learn so much less math between the fourth and the eighth
grade than do students in other countries? Could it be because so much more time
has been wasted in American schools during those four years?
Evidence is the one thing that our so-called educators want no part of.
They want to be able to simply declare there is genuinely great teaching,
"creative" learning, or "critical thinking," without having to prove anything to
anybody.
In states where tests have been mandated by law, the first order of
business of the teachers' unions has been to introduce as much mushy subjective
material as possible into these tests, in order to prevent anyone from finding
out how much — or how little — academic skills they are actually providing their
students.
The more fundamental question is whether our educational establishment has
even been trying to impart academic skills as a high-priority goal. Over the
past hundred years, American educators have been resisting the idea that schools
exist to pass on to the next generation the basic mental skills our culture has
developed. They have said so in books, articles, speeches — and by their actions
in the schools.
Since the rise of teachers' unions in the early 1960s — which coincided
with the decline of student test scores — the education establishment has
increasingly succeeded in de-emphasizing academic skills. In that sense, our
schools have not failed, they have succeeded in changing the goals and
priorities of education.
Despite all-out efforts by the education establishment to blame the
declining educational standards in our schools on everything imaginable except
the people who teach there — on parents, students, television or society — the
cold fact is that today's students are often simply not taught enough academic
material in the first place. Even if there were flawless parents, perfect
students, no television and no problems in society, students could still not be
expected to learn what they were never taught.
In fact, it is a lot to expect the teachers themselves to teach what they
do not know or understand. Tests have repeatedly shown, for decades on end, that
college students who go into teaching score at or near the bottom among students
in a wide variety of fields. No wonder they dislike tests. And no wonder that
they find innumerable fads more attractive than teaching solid skills, which
they themselves may not have mastered.
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