School System Woes Plague USA for Obvious Reasons

School System Woes Plague USA for Obvious Reasons


"Universal Education" Has Become More Than Just An Oxymoron


While the rest of the world is becoming the level playing field
of The Earth Is Flat variety, the United States is becoming the
opposite, a greater and greater socio-economic divide between a
ever more wealthy upper crust who will only give a minimum wage
increase that isn't really a raise at all with inflation for an
estate tax repeal that gives them the power to generate larger,
larger, and ever larger family fortunes that can be passed from
generation to unearned generation without taxation in an effort
to recreate "The Landed Gentry" aristocracy that ruined Europe.

This is not only taking place in the financial boardrooms "Wall
Street" provides for such purposes, nor in the hallowed hall of
the hidden "smoke filled room" of Congress, but it is taking up
residence right here in our own home towns where the school for
the rich is quite different from the school for the rest of us,
and even more different from the school for the poor.

More and more United States cities are suffering a return to an
elementary form of segregation, this time based on money rather
than on race.


Unites States school systems are suffering all over the country
in epidemic proportions without much attention to the causes or
possible proactive action rather than the usual remedial fares,
so expensive, and nearly always millions of dollars short and a
number of decades too late.

Other than the rather spectacular resurgence of math or science
in the post-Sputnik era that I was fortunate enough to surf and
take maximum advantage of, and a relatively similar resurgence,
that no one ever mentions, in the Liberal Arts as a result of a
decade simply known as "The Sixties," US school systems have an
extraordinarily perfect rate of decline since national testings
were instituted as part of the World War Two recruitment.

The results are there for all to see, at least those who may be
willing to look past the sugar coated placebo reports coming up
from revised, or should we say "revisionary," test scores, that
tell us flat out that even with the addition of higher learning
schedules in math and science in high schools, nationwide tests
continually reveal falling test scores when compared to a World
War Two base that started what we now have as SAT or ACT tests.

Any honest mathematician, and there are many, can tell you that 
it was the fact that these scores, dropping by a few tenths per
year over the period since the Us entered WWII, finally dropped
to under 90% of their initial scores that stimulated interest--
and not any of the plethora of causes of that event--but that's
a matter for someone other than mathematicians.

The FACT is that when we reached that 90% level it sparked more
interest than any of the direct causes of that event, resulting
in a flurry of methodologies to HIDE the problem by revisionist
manipulation of the test scores, even though the test scores in
many cases, sometimes even most, were not valid.

Not valid?

I happened to take my college entrance exams in a year when the
tests were so poorly run that experts said that flipping a coin
would give you better results as to success in college, and the
people I knew bore it out--"the best and brightest" dropped out
in greater numbers than the average student, due to frustration
with colleges that had not kept up with a rapidily changing new
educations that swept the country after Sputnik, in addition to
a general distrust of an educational system and fed students as
fodder to President Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex."

However, more modern causes of education in America have grown,
and we are just getting used to some of them in terms of a flat
Earth, as described by Thomas L. Friedman, globalization, and a
general neglect to deal with change at all levels.

Students are plain speaking in their responses to why they will
not go to school when you ask them, there are no jobs they want
that school will prepare them for.

Many of their former job scenarios have been "outsourced" along
with the motivation to be willing to be educational fodder to a
previously mentioned Military-Industrial Complex that no longer
provides jobs that require much in the way of education.  After
all, many job scenarios, including the military, merely look at
a high school diploma as evidence that a person can be trained,
not that they have learned anything of any particular value.

"Getting your ticket punched," as they used to say, means those
students who could tolerate and succeed at high school would be
likely to tolerate and succeed in the training provided by "The
Military-Industrial Complex."

I should add here that President Eisenhower's original phrase:
"The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex" was censored--
not even the President of the United States has free speech.

Back to the modern causes of America's educational malaise.

After WWII America dealt with segregation, at least of a kind,
but what started out as a methodology to end race segregation,
ended up as something quite different.

The upper class white folk pulled their children out of school
systems that were near enough to black population to have some
chance of racial integration and did one of two things:

1.  Moved to all-white upper class suburban centers.

2.  Moved their children to all-white private schools.

3.  Even public school teachers were reported to be 
    sending their own children to private school systems.

4.  Property taxes, long the bastion of the school systems
    have become too much more many people to bear:  those
    who can, as with the inner city messes, have moved to
    the outlying areas and then resisted annexation.

5.  Even when annexation is unavoidable, sometimes deals
    are made to be annexed by a smaller community with no
    major needs than by one of the larger cities that are
    already in financial crisis, and thus will tax anyone
    as much as they can/will bear.

6.  The major problem here:  the poor can't afford to move
    so the tax burden, both by political design and by the
    simple case of not being able to move, puts tax burden
    squarely on the shoulders and wallets, of those whom a
    simple alternative to most, is missing:  cannot move--
    have no political power.

This led to a different kind of discrimination based on class,
something that was obvious to the rest of the world but denied
by the United State.

Class warfare is one of the major causes of education failures
in America today, as those who can continued to move away from
those who cannot afford to move, thus creating their own sites
of "free enterprise zones" where they can do as they please.

What is left behind are degenerating industrial complexes, due
to the fact that the same thing is happening in globalization,
for the industrial complex, as is happening when the housewife
moves her family to suburbia to avoid the inner city mess they
created beforehand.

It is no longer just the Inner City that is decaying under the
burden of these events, nor individual industries, as happened
with "The Rust Belt," when the American steel industry refused
to keep up with Japanese and German steel after World War Two.
Duh!  If you bomb someone's steel mills, of course they have a
necessity of building new ones [and we helped them] and then a
newer industry naturally overtook an older one with technology
that gave them a huge advantage. . .while the United States is
yelling about unfair competition, "dumping," etc., when answer
after answer are staring them right in the face.

Just how much more obvious can it be, that a new techologicial
innovation in Japanese and German steelmaking is going to give
them a competitive edge?

The same, of course, is true in education, and other areas.

The real kicker, more than a fading infrastructure of industry
and education, along with failing transportation systems, is a
very real threat that the American financial centers will fail
in the same manner, which will finally bring attention, little
and late, to the fact that the world's one last super-power is
creating its own brand of kryptonite.

For now, the "solution" for those who can, is obvious:

Everyone is simply leaving the bad situations behind, and then
looking for green pastures, which are always over the fence.

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."