Classroom Diversity at All Time High, SAT Scores at 40 Year Low

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Mar 16, 2010
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Classroom Diversity at All Time High, SAT Scores at 40 Year Low

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SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached a four-decade low as the number and diversity of students taking the college admissions tests hit an all-time high, the College Board reported Monday.

The average reading score for the Class of 2012 was 496, down one point from the previous year and 34 points since 1972.

In Maryland over the past five years, there has been an 8.5 percent increase in the number of African Americans who have taken the SATs and a 15.5 percent jump in the number of Hispanics.

SAT reading scores hit a four-decade low - The Washington Post

Wow, Yet I'm the liar and the one wrong here. :eusa_shhh:
 
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You want answers to why this is happening? Many people have known for years how to solve the problem, but reversing the problem would weaken the governments and corporations, and weaken globalist integration while strengthen local communities and the individual entrepreneur. Even the people in charge know how to solve the problem. But the system works exactly as it was intended.

"Classroom Diversity at All Time High, SAT Scores at 40 Year Low?" Sounds like a social engineering success from a cultural elites point of view. The intelligence and knowledge of the individual members of society is not important. That they all be brought down to one common denominator, and all be made to act the same. This is, in the final anaylsis, what is important.

N.Y.Times Education Confab Ends in Zero
N.Y.Times Education Confab Ends in Zero
Also participating in this Times confab was Kaya Henderson, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, which has the worst reading scores in the country. What can she possibly tell us about effective teaching? In public education, principals and superintendents are chosen for their self-imposed ignorance. They must not have read books like Why Johnny Can’t Read, or Dumbing Us Down, or Is Public Education Necessary? Another participant was Lori Breslow, director of the Teaching and Learning Laboratory at M.I.T. She admitted that she knew nothing about what is going on in K-12 public schools.

That is why these conferences are little else than exercises in skirting around the real problems that beset American education. So they amount to little more than polite dinner conversation in which no one is supposed to say anything that would upset anybody. That is why when Professor Noguera suggested that some schools are being deliberately set up for failure, there was applause from the audience. Apparently, the audience was ready and able to accept the real truth about public education if that were the actual purpose of the conference.

But every day we are confronted with the failures of the government schools. The Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times, reported on September 15: “Most students not proficient in writing, test finds.” The report states:

Just a quarter of eighth and 12th grade students in the United States have solid writing skills, even when allowed to use spell-check and other computer word-processing tools, according to results of a national exam released Friday.

Twenty-seven percent of students at each grade level were able to write essays that were well-developed, organized, and had proper language and grammar — 3 percent were advanced and 24 percent were proficient. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.... In 2007, 33 percent of eighth grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.

The results at both grade levels showed a continued achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students.

Obviously, writing skills are not improving. The fact that 75 percent of American students have poor writing skills makes one wonder how this nation is expected to compete with other nations in the global economy. There is no excuse for this failure. We not only know how to teach reading effectively, we also know how to teach writing. But our curriculum does not provide for effective teaching of these skills.

Here are two excerpts from "[The] highly praised bestseller for over a decade, "Dumbing Us Down" is a radical treatise on public education that concludes that compulsory government schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in a machine."

From chapter One: The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher - By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=36056

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. "The kids have to know how to read and write, don't they?" "They have to know how to add and subtract, don't they?" "They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job."

Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.

But we've had a society essentially under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling, to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn't very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants.

Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I've just described to you.

The society that has become increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the United States products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual, family, and community importance, a diminishment that proceeds from central control. The character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable; they want more and more until there isn't any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life -- in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts -- and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people's reservation if you wish a demonstration.

School as it was built is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice which makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. From colonial days through the period of the Republic we had no schools to speak of -- read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography for an example of a man who had no time to waste in school -- and yet the promise of Democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republic when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life, a plan necessary to maintain a society where some people take more than their share. "I will show you," says Socrates, "how to bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say." And so the blueprint of the seven-lesson school was first sketched.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national school hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

From Chapter Two: THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHOOL
The Failure of Modern Public Education
http://theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Ed/GattoPsyPathSchl.htm

Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.

It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.

But these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.

Think of the phenomena which are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, and alcohol, and the worst pornography of all: lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy -all of these are addictions of dependent personalities, and this is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.
5.

I want to tell you what the effect on our children is of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because any reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be nothing more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children: and who can blame them? Toys are us.

2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present, the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness.

4. The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

5. The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness: they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade everything" and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.

8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

I could name a few other conditions that school reform will have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television has, or both. It's a simple matter of arithmetic - between schooling and television, all the time the children have is eaten up. There simply isn't enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other significant causes.
6.

What can be done?

First, we need a ferocious national debate that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous debate that journalism finds boring. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of home-schooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one medicine, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn't cost anything. More money and more people pumped into this sick institution will only make it sicker. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of "experts," a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes; our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, antihuman, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology: drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.
Whole Book:
Dumbing Us Down:
The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling
 
Classroom Diversity at All Time High, SAT Scores at 40 Year Low

What happened 40 years ago to make SAT scores so low? Coerced INTEGRATION!
 

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