[THS] Bob Herbert: Clueless in America

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19786.htm

Clueless in America

By Bob Herbert

22/04/08 "New York Times" -- -- We don’t hear a great deal about
education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to
compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or
Barack rolling a gutter ball.

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current
and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s
infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can
wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of
the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more
than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless
youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to
maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a
whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent
survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core
found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know
that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and
fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and
1900.

“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,”
said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he
described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”

Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another
third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either
productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high
school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing
something awfully wrong.

Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when
compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly
dismal as they move through the higher grades:

“In math and science, for example, our fourth graders are among the
top students globally. By roughly eighth grade, they’re in the middle of
the pack. And by the 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring generally
near the bottom of all industrialized countries.”

Many students get a first-rate education in the public schools, but they
represent too small a fraction of the whole.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, offered a brutal critique of the
nation’s high schools a few years ago, describing them as “obsolete”
and saying, “When I compare our high schools with what I see when
I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”

Said Mr. Gates: “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken,
flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of
those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when they’re
working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to
know today.”

The Educational Testing Service, in a report titled “America’s Perfect
Storm,” cited three powerful forces that are affecting the quality of life
for millions of Americans and already shaping the nation’s future. They
are:

• The wide disparity in the literacy and math skills of both the school-
age and adult populations. These skills, which play such a tremendous
role in the lives of individuals and families, vary widely across racial,
ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

• The “seismic changes” in the U.S. economy that have resulted from
globalization, technological advances, shifts in the relationship of labor
and capital, and other developments.

• Sweeping demographic changes. By 2030, the U.S. population is
expected to reach 360 million. That population will be older and
substantially more diverse, with immigration having a big impact on
both the population as a whole and the work force.

These and so many other issues of crucial national importance require
an educated populace if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the
moment we are not even coming close to equipping the population with
the intellectual tools that are needed.

While we’re effectively standing in place, other nations are catching up
and passing us when it comes to educational achievement. You have to
be pretty dopey not to see the implications of that.

But, then, some of us are pretty dopey. In the Common Core survey,
nearly 20 percent of respondents did not know who the U.S. fought in
World War II. Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the
president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11
percent thought it was Harry Truman.

We’ve got work to do.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company