Education and Business: An Incestuous Relationship

Eileen F. Toplansky

Why in Sam Hill would a sentient parent send his child to any school of higher learning in America today when "colleges across the country are

Mind you, it is not to increase standards.  No, the changes involve "lowering of standards and a very clear implication that students from certain backgrounds cannot score as high on tests as their peers of a different melanin makeup."

Instead of rooting out the reasons why students of color are doing so poorly, the Left continues to use them as cannon fodder to control the education of young American minds.

Why is it that the public education system has failed so many of its black and Hispanic students? How is the following possible?

[I]n America's public high schools, 45% of black students and 43% of Hispanics (as compared to 22% of whites) drop out before their classes graduate.  Dropout rates are especially high in urban areas with large minority populations, including such academic basket cases as the District of Columbia (57%), Trenton (59%), Camden (61.4%), Baltimore (65.4%), Cleveland (65.9%), and Detroit (75.1%).  

Of those black and Hispanic students who do manage to earn a diploma, a large percentage are functionally illiterate.  Black high-school graduates perform, on average, at a level that is four academic years below that of their white counterparts. Of all graduates in the class of 2011, only 11% of blacks and 15% of Hispanics were proficient in math, as compared to 42% of whites.  Similarly, just 13% of blacks and 4% of Hispanics were proficient in reading, versus 40% of whites.  As political science professor Lydia Segal notes in her book, Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools: "It is in cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia where the largest numbers of children cannot read, write, and compute at acceptable levels and where racial gaps between whites and blacks and Latinos are widest.  It is in large cities that minority boys in particular, trapped in poor schools, have the greatest chance of flunking out and getting sucked into the downward spiral of crime and prison."  

These failed, inner-city schools are run entirely by Democrats and progressives who, as author Jonah Goldberg points out, have "controlled the large inner-city school systems for generations."  Indeed, the powerful teachers unions overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party and its left-wing agendas; the bureaucrats at the Department of Education overwhelmingly hold progressive political and social views; and the ideological orientation of America's teacher-training colleges is decidedly leftist. All of these factors have combined to create the proverbial train wreck that is public education in the United States today.

It has not improved a whit since then...............To Read More