Is our Education System Bankrupt? Is it like General Motors and “Too big to fail?”

Sadly this would seem to be the case. Locally I recently checked our achievement levels on our state’s WASL for math and found that while we had 320 kids in the 8th grade that “Exceeded expectations” two years later, when they were 10th graders, this number had diminished to only 17!

I thought that this might be that the difficulty of the 10th grade exam was much harder so I checked a nearby high school for confirmation. This high school had, as 8th graders, 160 students who exceeded expectation and two years later still had 120 students that exceeded expectations.

Why is it that we have many kids that do pretty well, even by international standards, in elementary school, and yet we see declines such as this in our secondary schools? Isn’t this like buying a car that has excellent parts, but they don’t fit together and work well?

In the case of cars many of us have voted with our wallets and bought foreign cars. In the case of education we still have our “Vendor” telling us that we are getting value for our tax dollars.

If one looks at the websites of some of the schools that have been identified as “Failing,” or as some have called them “Drop-out factories,” you see a list of positives about why you should send your child to this school that has been identified as “Failing.”

The Fraser Institute recently did a ranking of all of the elementary, middle, and high schools in Washington. I checked the middle schools and high schools and found some very disturbing rankings.

Our best high school is only in the 2nd quartile, and we have one in the 3rd, and one in the 4th, lowest, quartile. Among middle schools we aren’t a lot better. Of our six middle schools none are in the first quartile, and three are in the lowest quartile. Yet, according to our school administration we are a “District of Distinction!”

But wait, we do have a seventh middle school! It is tied for 1st in the state! The Public Academy is right up there! Most discussions about achievement in this district start with the statement “Except for the Public Academy.”

Why do we make an exception for excellence? Is it that this would be “unfair” to the rest of our students?

The school district is eager to make us all aware of our successes on the athletic fields and courts, but I haven’t seen any references made to the Fraser Institute’s ranking of our schools! Being 96th, 193rd, and 276th of 359 high schools and 1st, 94th, 108th, 136th, 186th, 199th, 294th and 321st of 421 middle schools just doesn’t seem like good news.

What is it about the Public Academy that puts them 1st in the state? For a start there isn’t any student there whose parents did not make a deliberate decision to send them to this school.

These parents all had to fill out an application, then hope for a positive result from a lottery. These parents also probably have been to an information meeting about the school, and understand that there will be some “blood, sweat, and tears” involved in success at the Academy. Education is not a spectator sport for these parents.

Could it be that the quite different achievement levels found in our other middle schools are a result of allowing parents to “Sign out” of the education process, and having educators assure parents that the “Middle school experience” will be wonderful?

One only has to ask the students attending our middle schools what they like about the schools to get some kind of confirmation of the satisfaction the students have with middle schools.

Unfortunately these discussions usually don’t mention the academic programs of the middle school at least in a positive sense. Instead we quickly get to the entitlement of a “happy” experience of adolescence that seems to extend onward into high school.

Parents? Usually clueless! Report cards usually don’t report actual achievement, as related to absolute attainment of skills but rather a comparison of the student’s achievement to the rest of his/her class, not to the rest of students of their age. A cloak of euphuisms is spread over parents and students to make them believe that they are “doing well.”

In one of my visits to Europe I had the opportunity to watch a documentary on America’s Secondary Schools. What was it about? Preparations for a Prom! The Europeans are fascinated about our schools’ social activities. There was no mention of classes in this documentary!

The same is true of almost any television program in this country that has a school setting.

How is it then that kids at the Public Academy are still happy with their experience there where there isn’t an athletic program and social activities are limited? Is it that the parents’ expectations, that they share with their children, are more focused on achievement? I would think so.

So, is the education system bankrupt? If its goals were academic achievement there are probably few schools, at least in this state, that aren’t at least approaching this.

Statewide only 50% of our children can meet our minimal math standards. Would you buy a car if you had a 50% chance of it working? Why are we satisfied with a system that is ranked 43rd in the nation in high school completion?

Why do taxpayers support this? Isn’t this the route to academic bankruptcy in an age where knowledge is the currency?