Better Than Average

Remember the results of those worldwide tests evaluating the skills of school children? The one where the Chinese supposedly kicked the crap out of everybody, and the U.S. came in 43rd? Things are a little different than reported, it seems.

While I don't always agree with Pat Buchanan, he makes a very good point in this article, about how statistics can be misleading -- especially when they're being manipulated by a liberal administration in Washington which is intent on taking over public education en masse. When you parse the data, a very different result emerges:

Steve Sailer on VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America’s public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America’s schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science and math between Anglo and Asian students and black and Hispanic students.

And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.

The man who wrote The Bell Curve a few years ago was crucified by liberals and the media, but the results of the test show pretty clearly he was right on the money. More importantly, however, is the fact that our schools are not utter failures, just as our currency is not worthless. Those are lies propagated by groups who wish to garner power to themselves by re-organizing society in their favor.

Put more simply, it's nothing but good old-fashioned jealousy.

Are our schools perfect? Heavens no! Far from it. Tampering by well-intentioned but delusional liberals and power-gathering by politicians has unquestionably done great harm to our formerly stellar education system. But the damage is not fatal, and it's not irreversible. Despite the constant whining of many on the right, most teachers are committed people who simply want to teach children. I know this from firsthand, life-long experience; don't even presume to argue that point with me.

No, the predominant problem is not incompetence at the classroom level, and it's not the evil teacher unions padding pensions. It's not even the politicians sticking their noses into a system they do not understand and have no place within. (You let them do it, by the way, year after year. You put them in office.) Which segues nicely into what is the predominant problem: you.

That's right: it's you, Mr/s Parent.

You cheer on standardized testing, which is serving no one well except the test makers, all the while hamstringing the ability of teachers to actually educate your perfect little crotch-droppings. You complain when your snowflake has to walk a hundred yards to be picked up by a bus. You complain when your precious num-nums is given detention for being a little asshole in class. You complain that little Johnny Rottenbrain is not receiving enough personal attention because his classes are overcrowded, then you complain when the school district tries to pass a bond to build more schools. You complain that there are too many administrators, then you complain when they lay some off and the kids run amok in the halls. You complain that your child's school is unsafe, then you complain when they hire police officers and require you to be escorted while on campus.

But most of all, you fail to raise your own children, then dump them on the schools and hope that somehow, some way, those horrible, incompetent teachers will produce for you a model citizen.

You want to know what's wrong with modern American schools? Look in a mirror.

Do you truly want to improve your local schools? Then go to your school board and your superintendent and tell them to stop sending your tax and bond money to the state government for redistribution. Tell them it's YOUR money for YOUR kids and YOUR schools, and if they can't find the guts to tell the politicians to take a hike, you'll boot them out and find someone who can -- and you'll keep booting them out until it happens.

Otherwise, stop complaining. You made the bed.