The situation in elementary and secondary public education in this country is little short of desperate. The schools' physical plants are crumbling, but citizens, rebelling against suffocating taxes, refuse to vote additional monies for them.
For more than two decades, public schools also suffered the trauma of an unpopular and costly busing integration program that proved a near total failure. Much of the legislation prompting this has been rescinded, but the damage already is done. It helped cause the demise of the public schools by forcing concerned parents to enroll their children in private schools or move to the suburbs, where better systems prevailed. There were good reasons for this "white flight," for youngsters have only one chance at a good education. Few parents are going to sacrifice their offspring to unproven social programs.
Meanwhile, the government-mandated policy of "inclusiveness" weakened school academics. Already overworked teachers had to watch over and integrate the severely handicapped into the classroom. The idea was a do-gooder's dream turned nightmare.
A great number of students, coming from dysfunctional families, were undisciplined and had no respect for authority and little interest in learning. Decorum in the classroom virtually has vanished. The old expression of one rotten apple spoiling a barrelful was forgotten. Among many blacks, students getting good grades were condemned for "acting white." In many cases, the troublemakers, who couldn't be kicked out of school because of concern over false charges of civil rights violations, solved the problem themselves by dropping out. This proved bittersweet at best, for school funding usually is based on enrollment.
Finally, the states that have an overflow of immigrants, legal and illegal, are given the near-impossible task of contending with up to 20 different languages spoken by those enrolled in a single class. One art teacher friend commented that he could succeed in part only because art is a universal language, but couldn't understand how math and science teachers could do it:
The most telling criticism of public schools comes from IBM CEO Lou Gersten. He says that businesses spend $30,000,000,000 a year on remedial education for high school graduates they hire. Additionally, industry loses another like sum in an attempt to upgrade others who can't handle training in high tech.
Education? Who needs it? Most of all, the public schools do!
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