The
state of study is poor and getting worse!by Karl Loren
The
state of study is poor and getting worse!
Reading achievement among the nation's 4th graders—including the lowest-performing of those students—is showing signs of progress after a decade of state and federal initiatives to improve instruction in the early grades.
But the performance of older students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, is not so promising, with the scores of 8th graders stagnating over the past four years and those of 12th graders declining, according to the latest results released here June 19, 2003.
High school seniors turned in an average score of 287, a small, but statistically significant drop from 1998, and a 5-point drop from a decade ago. (source)
The actual test scores are usually very deceptively described in very optimist tones. The above "good news" about fourth graders masks the hard truth that:
About [TWO THIRDS] of 4th graders and 8th graders scored [below] the "proficient" level, meaning they could [NOT] show mastery over the challenging subject matter on the test. (source)
What is a "passing score" in grade school? Is it
33%?? Should we be satisfied when the test scores rise from 31% to 33% for
school kids. Would YOU be satisfied to learn that YOUR child was now
functioning at a 33% proficiency level?
Would it trouble you even more if you learned that this type of test result has been hidden from you for years -- that parents had no clue that their children were "learning" at that level of proficiency?
Perhaps most students are going to be stuck in schools where the passing score is still well below 50%, but those people, young and old, who come HERE enter a brand new experience.
In the year 2000's standardized NAEP test for math achievement, this is the percentage of black eighth graders who passed respectively in some famous states: New
York, 8%; California, 6%; Michigan, 6%; Tennessee, 6%; Texas, 7%; Arkansas, 2%. Indeed the national average for black eighth graders is 6% compared to 40% for white students, a 34% achievement gap. (source)
Is there a problem with our educational system? It could be worse! The image on the right was a school building in the South, some 65 years ago. Probably the buildings are much better now, but is the teaching getting worse as the test scores demonstrate?
The eCourses presented on this web site have the purpose to create habits in you -- a set of good study habits.
One habit you are creating is the expectation of 100% perfect scores. One trouble with "poor students" is that they have never practiced being "good students!"
Do you think it is an outlandish claim that I can show you how to achieve 100% perfect scores on study assignments, time after time? I make that claim for children and adults! However, I do NOT claim that my approach will work for drug addicts, whether they have taken street drugs or psychiatric drugs! There is a solution for these drug addicts. I don't provide that, but I do refer.
Another habit is to practice and be comfortable with the memorization of data -- you will find that your life will go more smoothly when you have identified the "data" you use most often, and find what part of that can be memorized to make it easier and quicker for you to use that data. (eCourse that does this)
The public lists "good work habits" as one of their key objectives with schooling for their children. Raising standards actually is the NUMBER ONE objective for the public -- that is where expecting 100% perfect scores comes in! Good work habits are created by practicing those habits, as you do on the study-related eCourses on this web site. When you do an eCourse there are no other students around to distract you -- so there are no troublemakers. With this web site you can pick exactly what eCourses you want to take. This web site achieves each of the objectives the public has indicated are most important.
Well, there are thousands of people who are now believers about the claims I have made over a 20+ year period that there IS a remedy for heart disease and a prevention for cancer. Every day some 10,000 people visit my 100,000 web pages to read the startling truth about the major killers of modern times.
You are right! I have no formal education in health.
I have a Master's Degree from the Harvard Business School. My
undergraduate work was in accounting at Ohio University. I also went to
the University of Rochester to study music. Likewise, I
have no formal education as a teacher. The fact that I did NOT study in
the areas of teaching, cholesterol, plaque and heart disease means that I did NOT pick up the usual false data that so fills
their course rooms. I have taken formal courses in "study" developed by
Mr. Hubbard.
Over many years I have taught myself, using the techniques of study that I know work, and which I did NOT learn in public school or Harvard!
I have written the truth about cholesterol and plaque -- a truth that many thousands of my vitamin customers know to be true, but many millions of others still don't understand. Instead they spend more than $20 billion every year on worthless cholesterol-lowering drugs and heart disease surgery and drugs. As I have responded to thousands of personal eMail requests for help I have been frustrated that so many people did not read, or could not understand all the answers that were already on my web sites.
I have spent a great deal of time researching the subject of "study" and exposed the true reason for the destruction of education in America, and most of the world. My major analysis of that is here.
The study philosophy presented on this web site is based on the discoveries and developments of Mr. L. Ron Hubbard.
Many thousands of people, all over the world, now find truth about heart disease on my many web sites. Many thousands will begin to find a similar, even more startling truth, about the process of study -- on THIS web site.
Now I offer similar revolutionary approaches to an even more universal problem than heart disease -- the problem of poor education that leads to so many other problems in our society. This is NOT a web site that merely exposes the poor quality of existing educational activities, but it IS a web site that offers you electronic courses that will help you learn how to study better and then help you understand many subjects using the revolutionary eCourse technology that I have developed.
They are also called "Cyber Schools" -- places that offer "electronic courses." Here is a quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial, by William J. Bennett:
When it comes to reforming K-12 education, two powerful ideas are in play: standards and freedom. High standards will lift all boats, if joined to reliable tests and tough accountability measures that reward children who learn what they should and reward schools and educators who successfully teach what they should -- and that bring sanctions to bear on failure.Freedom puts parents in the driver's seat to decide what schools their children attend, enables them to exit bad schools for better ones, injects competitive forces and incentives into the education industry, and tames bureaucratic monopolies, ed-school cartels and other dysfunctional arrangements.
Both standards and freedom have merit. Both have been shown to work in practice and theory. Both are enormously popular with the American people (although not with many "professional" educators). But our two political parties agree on just one of them. Both espouse standards and can find common ground on testing and accountability. Thus the bipartisan base for the farthest-reaching federal education legislation in decades, the No Child Left Behind Act. While this measure is closely associated with George W. Bush, it is the descendant of Bill Clinton's "Goals 2000" plan and its passage owed much to support by Democrats Ted Kennedy in the Senate and George Miller in the House.
Messrs. Kennedy and Miller are also responsible, however, for radically restricting other Bush proposals that offered choices to parents and flexibility to states. Those sprang from the second big reform idea -- freedom -- which Democrats view as enemy territory. Thus No Child Left Behind is almost entirely about standards. So are state education-reform schemes that emerged from Democratic legislatures or bipartisan "consensus."
In education, freedom not only can co-exist with standards; it adds potent weapons to the standards arsenal. It gives children -- as in Jeb Bush's Florida and Bill Owens's Colorado -- private alternatives to failing public schools. It gives principals pursuing stronger academic results the right to hire, compensate and, when necessary, fire teachers. It empowers parents to become allies in the push for higher standards by letting them opt for different public schools, private schools, charter schools, cyber schools, home schools and a hundred other variations that are beginning to emerge. It enables would-be teachers to enter the classroom without tedious, costly detours through education schools and state certification bureaus. (Source)
The statistics on test scores above are very stark. They paint a picture of the state of study as poor and getting worse. Yet, when you watch the evening news, or hear some politicians, and particularly some Harvard professors of education, you get a very different story. You get many claims that "we are winning the war on poor teaching."
Oh! They would never admit that it is "poor teaching"
that is being overcome. For many years these apologists for failure would
claim that the government was not spending enough money on education. Now
that this justification is proven invalid, they search around for some other way
to blame the parents (for lack of involvement) or society or someone -- other
than the teachers.
Also, they don't blame the students! Those students who cause disruption, or smoke pot on campus? The education elitist feels that it THEIR responsibility to take the place of parents, and be responsible for even the delinquent drug addict child -- on behalf of the government. Nothing could be further from the truth than this common view from a politician on a "Education Committee" in the Arizona State Senate:
Totalitarian states hold students accountable through standards, free states hold schools accountable through measures of academic gain and rated excellence by parents, students and teachers. (source)
This web site holds the STUDENT responsible for learning proper habits of study, and offers to teach those habits with eCourses. I do not allow those on either street or psychiatric drugs to take these eCourses.
I DO put the primary responsibility on the STUDENT -- to learn how to study, and that is the help I offer on these web site.
When the teachers can't get away with absolving juvenile delinquent students, or drug addict students, or insufficient government funding, one not unusual technique was simply to hide the truth or lie about it. Yes, States were capable of doing that -- and finding justifications for these offenses against the nation.
There is a glimmer of hope in the "No Child Left Behind Act" that came into force in early 2002. But, that Act is being sabotaged and shredded by those we too often think of as the "experts" to whom we entrust our children. Also, in order to get bipartisan support President Bush had to cut out some of the most important reforms he knows worked in Texas and are badly needed for the nation. But, this Act is a start down the road of sanity. It was Ted Kennedy who insisted on cutting out the important features that would have made this a much better bill. But it has much more potential for improving schools and education than the elitist educators suspected. I believe it will revolutionize education in America. But, you can have that revolution HERE, NOW, rather than wait the 10 years or so before that Act finally affects YOUR school district.
The chart, next below, puts the lie to the claim that more money needs to be spent to improve education!
The red line represents average reading scores -- you see that it is relatively flat while spending has increased tremendously.
The
main thing to realize about test scores and education is just how very strong is
the emotional charge embedded in the stories you'll read. It is as if the
teachers have dug deep holes to put their feelings into -- these are NOT surface
feelings you run into when you criticize schools or teachers.
A large number of people, and organizations, have so much invested in the current teaching techniques that they will go to almost any lengths to justify whatever results "their school" gets.
Click here to read about the inconsistencies and inadequacies of previous State reporting on the success or failure of their educational systems.
Under our federal system and the 1994 law, states were required to define "adequate yearly progress." Since then, states have chosen many ways to report their data--not every state defines achieving and underachieving schools in the same way.
Some states define progress as closing the achievement gap between sub-groups of students. Others define it as meeting absolute targets on state tests. A third way is measuring growth or progress on state tests from one year to another. No matter what the method, the state establishes the target. (source)
Click here to read about the failure of the States to even set targets for making gains every year. If you don't set such targets, you cannot report failures! The "No Child Left Behind" Act (NCLB) requires that States set targets for improvement, and corrective intervention if there is no improvement.
- Academic expectations and improvement timeframes will be clear.
- States will establish academic achievement goals by setting academic standards in core subjects and measuring progress using tests aligned to state standards.
- States will set annual progress goals for school improvement, so all students can reach proficiency and no child is left behind.
- Schools will be identified as needing improvement if they are not meeting these goals. (source)
Others are so much on the outside of the current teaching institutions that they are willing to look for every possible decline and call failure to the entire system.
In other words, it is usually hard to find a truly valid source of data in this vitally important area of our lives.
When you look at the "level of ability" of young students a few hundred years ago, there is no question that today's children are so far below that level as to be unbelievable. This tremendous drop in ability over a couple centuries has been so dramatic that the "defenders of the faith" have a ready-set arsenal of weapons to aim at those early results.
Mostly the defenders of modern education try to grapple with the past several decades, during which fairly consistent school testing allows one to compare with some degree of comfort in the arithmetic, if not the results.
When you compare today's third graders with third graders of 20 years ago you find a modest decline in test scores, but when you compare high school sophomores' scores now with three decades ago, you find a tremendous decline.
While the decline in ability from the days of the McDuffey's Readers is startling, it is explained with justifications of history and other items "too complex to understand today!"
But, when you see a decline in test scores just over the last 30 years, using what seems to have been standard tests, this is harder to justify as "OK."
So, there has built up a rather broad consensus that our
educational system has failed us. This consensus is certainly shared by many members
of the teachers unions, or the NEA. At least one large group of critics of
the modern education blames the NEA -- the National Education Association.
I do not join that group of critics because I think our teachers are more than
willing to make any changes that they understand and that they think will
"work." But, I do find that those who hold positions of leadership in the
NEA, and virtually all the "professors of education" in our universities are
blind to the failures they have wrought upon us.
Here are the false and damaging claims made by the NEA:
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (the latest revision of ESEA) presents real obstacles to helping students and strengthening public schools because it focuses on:
- punishments rather than assistance
- mandates rather than support for effective programs
- privatization rather than teacher-led, family-oriented solutions (source)
These, unfortunately, are false and misleading claims from this politically-oriented labor union that does NOT want to see changes that would make schools and teachers more accountable for school results.
Those individuals who have been enough outside the educational system to think they can view it objectively usually come up with enough declining statistics, and horror stories, to convince other object people that "something must be done!"
There is very little agreement on "what should be done," so the easy common denominator for many decades has simply been to throw more money in the direction of education and hope that would improve results.
That technique "worked" for many years. It did not improve test scores, but it kept the critics quiet.
The continuing failure, despite increased funding, has made the arguments for "reform" stronger than ever.
