Wasteful Culture
April 21st, 2008I could not believe this story when I read it. People are throwing ten thousand dollar birthday parties for children? A friend of mine believes that the biggest problem facing this country is the lack of discipline within families, manifesting itself most prominently in work ethic and money. How can a household expect its children to grow into successful members of the world community when they are spending thousands of dollars on birthday parties for people who are barely three years old!
And while we’re on the subject of waste, how about the manner in which we allow and encourage high dropout rates in our country?
It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and uneducated generation, and there’s more to come. On April 1, America’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study revealing that fewer than half of the teenagers in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out of high school before they graduate — more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is enormous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and (because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. This report sounded like an April Fool’s joke on the growing number of fools, meaning all of us.
The high school dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards — standing at the edge of a precipice, with no idea how far he’ll fall, when fall he will. It’s no coincidence that the number symbol for the fool is a zero. A hundred times zero is still zero. “When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe,” says Colin Powell, the former secretary of State and founding chairman of America’s Promise Alliance. His wife Alma chairs the Alliance now. Speaking as the old soldier he is, he describes these statistics as “a call to arms.” The Powells are joining Margaret Spellings, secretary of Education, to call for summits in every state to figure out how to halt the decline in graduation rates, as well as to better prepare public school graduates for work and college.
But do we really need more meetings to talk endlessly (and tediously) about shopworn educational ideas and stale theories? Alma Powell answers the question before someone asks it: The summits won’t be jabber-jabber sessions. “They will be about action,” and demand that local, state and federal policymakers, grass roots communities, parents, students and advocates confront the reality now. The statistics show what seems obvious to everybody: City kids are far more likely to live on the precipice than kids from the suburbs. The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center finds that graduation rates in city schools are 15 percentage points lower than those in the suburbs. In some cities, the disparity is as wide as 35 percent. It’s the kids in the largest cities who can’t see the value of an education. Life on the street and the grunt jobs found there ought to make even homework look attractive.
Knowledge is power, and this is the lesson we have to find a way to teach. Only by identifying horrific statistical disparities can we begin to demand change. But, we must be careful about what kind of change to make.
No Child Left Behind legislation has left troublesome, unintended consequences. When the legislation imposed rigid standards, teachers began to “teach to the test” instead of imparting actual knowledge. Secretary Spellings wants to require states to provide more uniform graduation data, but this will require careful monitoring, too. States sometimes inflate graduation rates, so they won’t invite sanctions from the federal bureaucrats who dole out the money.
I listen to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about healthcare or the economy and I hear John McCain laud the war in Iraq while my classmates hiss at the subject and Al Gore changes slides to focus on the polar ice caps, but for my money there is nothing more important facing this country than the deep educational crisis. This is a nation that has strived for efficiency through its existence, and now we are wasting energy as if oil will never run out, cash as if there is an endless supply, and children as if we can or should skip an entire generation of human beings who have not been provided adequate educational opportunity due to inadequate funding systems and familial relationships. If we are not careful and prudent in educating our people, we will suffer from significant brain-drain and what makes this especially frustrating is that doctors, scientists, engineers, philosophers, lawyers, businessmen won’t be leaving this country because it is repressive or there is little opportunity for advancement as a result of bureaucracy or censorship.
No, our national will experience brain-drain because our government has flushed its children’s brains, and that is simply unacceptable.