America’s troubled youth foreshadow trouble for America’s future

Commentary by James Shott

 

As if there aren’t enough problems facing America, there’s one that we hear about here and there in comic segments on TV, but those episodes don’t really show the problem in a way that we realize its impact.

America has produced a substantial number of young people that do not know the fundamental elements of their country or the important aspects of its operation, and who are therefore unprepared to discharge the duties and obligations of citizenship.

Ours is a country whose success and ability to continue being successful depend upon its citizens understanding its foundational principles, knowing how government is supposed to work, being able to discern when it has strayed from its proper course, and then work to restore things so that the republic can and will survive and thrive.

Columnist Walter Williams addressed this aspect of the younger generation in a column titled “Dumb American Youth,” and provides some troubling statistics that help to put this problem in perspective.

“According to a Philadelphia magazine article, the percentage of college grads who can read and interpret a food label has fallen from 40 to 30,” Williams wrote. “They are six times likelier to know who won ‘American Idol’ than they are to know the name of the speaker of the House. A high-school teacher in California handed out an assignment that required students to use a ruler. Not a single student knew how.”

He quoted a News Forum for Lawyers article about a study by American Institutes for Research revealing that more than “75 percent of two-year college students and 50 percent of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks.”

And included in Williams’ essay was this damning assessment of today’s youth: “Reported by Just Facts, in 2009, the Pentagon estimated that 65 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were unqualified for military service because of weak educational skills, poor physical fitness, illegal drug usage, medical conditions or criminal records. In January 2014, the commander of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command estimated this figure at 77.5 percent, and in June 2014, the Department of Defense estimated this figure at 71 percent.”

These children have a family of some description, most of them attended 12 years of public or private schools, and some of them attend or have attended American colleges. Starting with the family, they should have learned proper respect for themselves, for others and for the rules of life, and during their education have broadened their understanding of what life is all about, and how to be a good person and a responsible citizen.

Perhaps it is of some comfort that these youngsters have not achieved this humiliating level of unknowing all by themselves. Or, maybe not.

Without a blanket condemnation of all the nation’s schools, in some schools at all grade levels it is increasingly common for indoctrination to replace education, as teachers sometimes throw off their professional, ethical and moral responsibilities to present subject matter free of ideology, and leave political and ideological ideas in the safe confines of better judgment.

However, many a college campus now is the prisoner of political correctness and those who champion it. Trigger warnings are now required for “troubling” class material, and there are rules for microaggressions, safe spaces, free-speech zones, and the use of one of more than 30 gender pronouns that must be used as each transgender student prefers.

And we now are being told that using traditional, proper grammar is racist or produces social injustice.

A poster created by the director, staff, and tutors of the Writing Center at the University of Washington, Tacoma states “racism is the normal condition of things,” saying that rules, systems, expectations in courses, school and society are filled with it.

“Linguistic and writing research has shown clearly for many decades that there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” the writing center’s statement claims. “Language is constantly changing. These two facts make it very difficult to justify placing people in hierarchies or restricting opportunities and privileges because of the way people communicate in particular versions of English.”

The writing center will “listen and look carefully and compassionately for ways we may unintentionally perpetuate racism or social injustice, actively engaging in antiracist practices,” and will “emphasize the importance of rhetorical situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts,” and promises “to challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations.”

Apparently, it no longer matters at UW, Tacoma if words are put together in functional constructions, or if unconventional words and phrases are used in written materials students submit for grades. Does this make acceptable writing that is unintelligible?

If you aren’t going to teach or expect accepted grammar, what about correct spelling? Will there be any expectation of effective communication among college students at UW, Tacoma in the future?

From their earliest days many American youth are not taught important aspects of being a productive, responsible person. And when they are old enough to go to school, too many of them are exposed to indoctrination to guide them away from established standards and traditions.

This, and similar crises, strike at the heart of America.

Cross-posted from Observations

Draining the swamp: American education is ripe for improvement

Commentary by James Shott

Among the many hot topics since Donald Trump won election as the 45^th President of the United States is America’s education system. Once at the top of the nations of the world in educating its young, America has lost ground.

Jon Guttman, Research Director of the World History Group, wrote in 2012 that “[a]s recently as 20 years ago, the United States was ranked No.1 in high school and college education,” and that “[i]n 2009, the United States was ranked 18th out of 36 industrialized nations.” He attributes that decline to “complacency and inefficiency, reflective of lower priorities in education, and inconsistencies among the various school systems.”

In 2010 at a Paris meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who served from 2009 through 2015, said this:

“Before the 1960s, almost all policymaking and education funding was a state and local responsibility. In the mid-1960s, the federal role expanded to include enforcing civil rights laws to ensure that poor, minority, and disabled students, as well as English language learners, had access to a high-quality education.

“As the federal role in education grew,” Duncan said, “so did the bureaucracy,” adding that the U.S. Department of Education often “operated more like a compliance machine, instead of an engine of innovation,” and that it concerned itself with the details of formula funding, and not with educational outcomes or equity.

He went on to say that the United States needed to challenge the status quo, and to close the achievement and opportunity gaps. Five years later, the U.S. still lagged behind many other countries.

The findings in the 2015 Program International Student Assessment (PISA), described by CNN as “a benchmark of education systems conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of the world's richest economies,” finds the U.S. education system improved since the last assessment in 2012 in the areas of science, math and reading.

However, that improvement leaves American students ranked behind the students of 24 other countries, among the 72 participating nations. Teens in Singapore, Japan and Estonia led the more than half a million 15-year-olds in the 2015 assessment, the primary focus of which was science, with math as the primary focus in 2012.

President Jimmy Carter signed the federal Department of Education into law in 1979, and since it became active the following year, American education has gotten worse, as measured by these international assessments. Marginal or negative performance is not unusual for federal agencies, however. President-Elect Donald Trump, like Ronald Reagan before him, has called for abolishing the Department of Education, citing the need to cut spending.

Looking back to the formative years of the republic, we find the Founders established only four cabinet level activities: foreign relations through the State Department; national defense through the Department of War (now Defense); taxation and spending through the Department of the Treasury; and enforcement of federal law through the Attorney General (now the Department of Justice).

The increase of federal agencies has no doubt produced some benefits, but does their performance justify the costs incurred?  They have produced huge growth in government control of our lives, and enormous expense. Today there are nearly four times as many cabinet level agencies as the Founders thought necessary.

The federal education effort has many sins on its list, but the primary sin is the shifting of control of local schools to Washington by dangling federal dollars in front of state school officials, which they can earn in return for giving up some degree of control over their schools. Federal influences also contribute to the infestation of standardized testing, which in moderation can provide benefits, but when a typical student takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-kindergarten classes and 12th grade, that is over the edge. Eighth-graders, it is said, spend an average of 25.3 hours on standardized testing.

Trump has named Betsy DeVos to become education secretary. Her bio explains that in education she “has been a pioneer in fighting to remove barriers, to enact change and to create environments where people have the opportunity to thrive,” and that her political efforts are focused on advancing educational choices. She currently chairs the American Federation for Children.

Like all of Trump’s cabinet selections so far, DeVos is seen as unqualified, criticized for her lack of experience in education and for pushing to “give families taxpayer money in the form of vouchers to attend private and parochial schools, pressed to expand publicly funded but privately run charter schools, and trying to strip teacher unions of their influence,” according to an unflattering story in The New York Times.

Perhaps the contrary is true, however. Given the lackluster performance of the Department of Education when run by apparently qualified people, someone with other strengths just might be able to turn the department into a positive influence on what is broadly considered a mediocre education system.

Schools are best operated by those closest to the students, so returning control to states and localities will be a good first step.

Cross-posted from Observations

America’s schools reflect cultural problems

The news about U.S. education from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is much less than satisfactory, showing that Americans aged 16 to 34 – the so-called millennial generation – scored lower than their peers in 15 of the 22 countries participating in the assessment, despite being regarded as the most educated generation in U.S. history.

The group ranked last for numeracy, tied with Spain and Italy, and last in problem solving in technology-rich environments, tied with the Slovak Republic, Ireland and Poland.

The Educational Testing Service, which reported the results, notes that America’s huge investment in K-12 education has produced disappointing results when compared with students in other countries.

The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) commented on the report’s conclusions that “while more young Americans have attained higher education levels since 2003, those who have at least a high school education have demonstrated declining numeracy scores.”

The PIACC assessment is not the only discouraging news on the education front.

Reporting on an analysis of achievement differences in 28 countries in the Organisation (sic) for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), NCPA notes that the U.S. has a higher percentage of 15 year-old students living in single-parent families than all countries except Hungary, with the U.S. showing 20.7 percent of those students, and Hungary having 20.8 percent. The average of all countries with 15 year-olds living in single-parent families is 13.7 percent, meaning the U.S. has half again more than the average of OECD countries.

Ludger Woessman of the University of Munich performed the analysis, and NCPA notes that he reported that “single-parent homes tend to have fewer resources – and less time – to devote to their children, and various studies indicate that children of single parents in the United States face greater emotional distress and have lower educational attainment,” and that generally, “children of single-parent families score lower than students in two-parent families, on average scoring 18 points worse.”

The difference in performance between single- and two-parent families is more pronounced in the U.S., amounting to approximately one grade level, and is further affected by socio-economic status, immigration status, and parent’s education levels.

Not that additional proof is needed that our cultural decay, particularly where the family is concerned, has far reaching implications, this information ought to serve notice that if we don’t restore traditional American values and reestablish stable families, our future is bleak.

Back in 2005 Bloomberg Business reported that “Today's U.S. workforce is the most educated in the world,” citing statistics showing that 85 percent of Americans had at least a high school diploma, more than three times as many as in 1940, and that five times more Americans had a college degree over that same period.

It was this focus on education that Bloomberg cited as the reason for the U.S. economy being the world’s largest.

But Bloomberg offered this warning: “But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline,” citing a report by the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education. The report goes on to say that as highly educated baby boomers age out of the workforce, young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees, will replace them, and those replacements will earn less, and therefore drive down the standard of living.

Today we have a growing number of young people less interested in getting an education, and an education system that provides far too many of those who do go to school an inadequate education.

There are many examples where public schools seem to have renounced common sense and adopted politically correct paradigms. In one, a six year-old boy was suspended for “sexual harassment” for giving a female classmate a peck on the cheek. A high school senior was given in-school suspension for the felonious act of saying, “bless you” when a classmate sneezed. A seven year-old boy was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, and supposedly saying “Bang, bang.” An elementary school impounded a third-grade boy’s batch of 30 homemade birthday cupcakes because they were adorned with green plastic figurines representing World War II soldiers.

It is important how many Americans are high school and college graduates, but more important is that they actually command useful information that prepares them to be good citizens and get and hold a job. If we have become more concerned with infecting schools with politically correct nonsense, or focus more on test results than on making sure students know American and world history, can perform functional math, can communicate effectively, understand basic science and economics, and can think critically, diplomas and degrees will mean little or nothing.

Education must again become purely the domain of states and localities, and parents must have not only primary responsibility for how their kids perform in school, but they must also have the ability to send their kids to schools that perform best.

Interesting polls, other than the North Pole, that are in the news

As the year-end draws nearer, polling organizations provide a look into the likes and dislikes of Americans.

**The Gallup organization’s daily tracking poll of December 16-18 shows that only 23 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country. Not surprisingly, a breakdown shows that 38 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independents said they were satisfied with the way things were going in the U.S. throughout 2014, compared with just 10 percent of Republicans.

**The U-3 unemployment rate stands at 5.9 percent and the underemployed rate at 14.9 percent, based on Gallup’s thirty-day rolling average, and President Obama’s approval rating stands at 43 percent approval to 52 percent disapproval, having moved from a virtual tie at 46 percent in August of last year.

**Gallup finds Congress just a hair higher than its all-time record low approval rating of 14 percent, at 15 percent. Just 13 years ago Congress was rated at a record 56 percent, but its rating has not been higher than 20 percent in the last five years, or in six of the last seven years.

**A Rassmussen poll found that 86 percent of U.S. adults are proud to be Americans, and 92 percent believe that U.S. citizenship is very important. However, only 40 percent of voters like President Obama’s unilateral amnesty for up to five million illegal aliens to remain in the country. Roughly half think the U.S. will suffer because of the amnesty and that it will increase illegal immigration.

**The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks daily how Americans evaluate their lives on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. The Index shows 55 percent are thriving, 42 percent struggling, 4 percent suffering, and 12 percent are under stress.

**A USA Today poll in November asked whether respondents favor approval of the Keystone XL pipeline project. By 60 percent to 25 percent, respondents favor approving the project, with 14 percent unsure.

**On its Website, Gallup notes “U.S. federal government workers are less engaged than the rest of the U.S. workforce. On average, 27 percent of federal government employees are engaged in their jobs in 2014, compared with 31 percent of all other workers in the U.S. With more than 2 million federal employees, this lack of engagement is costing the federal government an estimated $18 billion in lost productivity annually, or approximately $9,000 per employee.”

Gallup says that engaged employees feel connected to their organization and work to move it forward, while those who are not engaged may meet the expectations of their job, but don’t do anything extra for it, and those who are actively disengaged actually undermine their engaged co-workers. “Those federal government employees who are actively disengaged, combined with those employees who are not engaged, translates into 11 percent lost productivity across the government, according to a Gallup analysis. This suggests that nearly $9,000 of the average $78,467 federal employee salary is not producing benefits for the agency or the general public.”

**A Rassmussen Reports poll found that respondents believe America’s Founders would view the nation today as a failure by a margin of 46 percent to 36 percent, with 18 percent being unsure. The Founders, a group that includes Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison, would not approve of what is going on in America today, according to this poll, and it is comforting to note that contemporary Americans agree with the Founders. But, will this dissatisfaction actually lead to a return to the founding principles of limited government and a high level of personal liberty?

**Fully 78 percent of participants like the health care they received before the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare was passed, but they believe that the health care they have been getting in recent years will get worse under Obamacare.

**Gallup found that among 11 professions nurses have the highest honesty and ethical standards, with 80 percent ranking them high or very high. Doctors, pharmacists, police officers and clergy round out the top five, while Members of Congress rank last at 7 percent.

**A Rassmussen poll in April reflected that 54 percent of participants consider the federal government a threat to individual liberty, while just 22 percent see government as a protector of individual rights, a number that stood at 30 percent five months earlier. Thirty-seven percent actually fear the federal government, while 47 percent do not, and 17 percent are uncertain.

**Gallup asked public school teachers if they have experienced each of seven possible emotional reactions to the Common Core State Standards (Worried, Frustrated, Resigned to it, Hopeful, Confident, Angry, or Enthusiastic), and 65 percent said Worried, 62 percent said Frustrated, and 57 percent said Resigned to it, while only 20 percent said Enthusiastic, 24 percent said Angry, and 27 percent said Confident. Forty-nine percent said they were Hopeful.

Where parents of public school students are concerned, 35 percent view Common Core negatively, 33 percent view it positively, and 32 percent aren’t familiar with it or don’t have an opinion. Gallup found a shift toward negative feelings since April when 35 percent were positive and 28 percent were negative.

Best wishes to all for a Happy Chanukah and a Merry Christmas!