Public schools continue to decline - Debra Saunders and the NEAP report

Recently my mother sent me a link to a column by Debra J. Saunders on a recent NEAP report. In the column Higher Grades, Lower Scores Debra reviews the results of the NEAP report. Her opening paragraph is:

"After all those years of educators focusing on improving the basics in public schools, how is it possible that the National Assessment for Educational Progress just gave America's high school seniors their lowest score for reading since 1992?"

What this means is that after a couple decades of effort by the government to improve public education, things have continued to get worse.

The second paragraph continues with:

"Students in elementary school have improved their skills in reading, writing and math, but the improvement 'stops in middle school and completely stops in high school,' answered Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Educational Excellence in Sacramento and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, who called me from a NAGB meeting in Nashville, Tenn."

When I read this I think: "OK the longer children are in public schools, the worse the education."

You can check out the NEAP report. The Nation's Report Card: 12th-Grade Reading and Mathematics 2005, the NEAP report, is a 28 page, 3.5 Megabyte file. It is also available in pieces. You can read the Executive Summary, the Grade 12 Reading Results, or the Grade 12 mathematics Results.


I use a Franklin Covey Planner. A couple years back I watched a training video on how to use it. Stephen Covey had a line that has stuck with me over the years. He said something like "It doesn't do any good to be making progress on a ladder if the ladder is on the wrong wall." His point was that we need to step back now and then to make sure we are moving towards our goals.

Public education doesn't seem to be making progress. Reports like the NEAP report show things have gotten worse over the last twenty years. The right answer is to step back and reevaluate how public schools are run. It would be great to move the ladder to a couple other walls, try vouchers, open up charter schools, get the federal and state governments out of public education.

But history teaches us that a bureacratic organization only fights change. So much of public education is politics. Different interest groups are fighting to get their agenda exposed to the children, rather than making sure the children get a good solid education.

The bottom line is that public schools are in trouble, and for at least the next couple years they will continue to get worse. This is one of the reasons why tens of thousands of parents turn to home schooling every year.


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