By Steve Levy
You’ll be seeing this column referencing the great, late Charles Krauthammer, quite a number of times in the future
One of his most notable lines was that the decline of a vibrant civilization is a choice. By that, he means it’s usually not external forces that bring the empire down, but rather foolish policies promulgated by those who lead the empire.
And such is the case when it comes to the remarkable decline of student performance within our shores.
There was a time decades ago when the American educational system was the envy of the world. It hasn’t been that way in a long time.
Despite the fact that we spend more per child, by far, than any other country, our students’ performance on math and reading scores hover at the bottom of the pack of industrialized nations.
Something happened to cause this, and it wasn’t a sudden change in the DNA of our children.
A report from the University of San Diego shows that there was a dramatic decline in math skills for incoming freshmen in the University of California. Much of it had to do with the closing of our schools during Covid, something Europeans did not resort to.
But we have also ushered in an era in the United States where standardized testing was reduced or eliminated, grades were inflated, and standards were lowered.
We’ve also allowed the inmates to run the asylum within our schools, meaning teachers are given less power and are often in fear of their unruly students because progressive administrators and elected officials have eroded discipline, in large part because students of color are disciplined at a disproportionately higher level. (Note how former New York mayor Bill de Blasio decided to just end disciplining anyone rather than trying to find out the reasons for this disparity.)
Perhaps the best proof of our academic decline being tied to our choices is the story of the Mississippi miracle. It is the path by which test scorers in Mississippi went from among the lowest in the nation to among the highest in a very short time.
The improvement came about as a result of a choice made by the state legislature and education officials to demand more of their students in the third grade or face the prospect of being left back. Those who were failing were prompted to take courses providing extra help, which put them over the top. It was indeed miraculous how such a simple, commonsense approach catapulted this failing state into a model for the rest of the nation.
The purveyors of the huge bureaucracy in government and our educational institutions make the claim that our educational decline is a complex matter that has to do with racism and a lack of funding. Mississippi proves otherwise.
Our decline was the result of bad choices by our leaders. And a revival is also a choice. Will we choose wisely to adopt commonsense measures that can make us academic leaders again, or choose instead to continue down the same path that is accelerating our decline as a nation?