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by Paul R. Hollrah, Contributor to Lincoln Heritage Institute
The ACT, the testing organization that measures the academic achievement of U.S. high school graduates, has announced the results for some 1.2 million students who took the ACT in 2005. As reported in The New York Times on Wednesday, August 17, only about half of this year’s high school graduates have the reading skills they will need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level math and science courses.
The ACT establishes benchmarks for reading comprehension, English, math, and science by correlating ACT scores from previous years with the grades that those same students actually received as college freshmen. The benchmarks allow educators to determine the skill level at which a student has a 70 percent chance of earning a C or better, in any given course, and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better.
According to the Times, of those students who took the ACT in 2005, only 51 percent achieved the C-level benchmark in reading comprehension, 26 percent in science, and 41 percent in math. Sixty-eight percent reached the C-level benchmark in English.
According to Dr. Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, “It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college.
“It is a source of concern,” he said, “that too many students are not taking the kind of rigorous high school courses that will prepare them for college.…Only 56 percent of this year’s graduates who took the ACT had completed the recommended core curriculum for college-bound students.”
Having digested that bit of bad news about the quality of students that our public schools are turning out, and understanding that we spend up to three times as much per student as other industrialized nations where students score much higher, it’s only fair that we take a look at what teachers are doing to prepare themselves for the job that we pay them to do.
The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union, held its 2005 convention in Los Angeles from July 1-6. So, in the face of the totally unacceptable results published by ACT, what are some of the concerns that the 9,000 delegates addressed while enjoying all of the diversions of “Tinseltown, USA?”
Among the many resolutions passed by the teachers were these:
- A resolution to participate in the national “Wal-Mart Consumer Education Campaign” (boycott) initiated by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, AFL-CIO.
- A resolution to study the feasibility of initiating a boycott of Gallo wines, in support of a consumer action (boycott) by the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO.
- A resolution to investigate NEA-endorsed financial firms regarding their position on the privatization of Social Security, and to inform state and local affiliates of the names of organizations that are leading “these attacks on our members’ retirement security.”
- A resolution to expand the NEA’s nationwide plan to elect anti-school choice, anti-voucher candidates to Congress in 2006.
- A resolution to oppose the “Michigan Civil Rights Initiative,” prohibiting the University of Michigan, the State of Michigan, and other state entities from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.
- A resolution calling upon the President of the United States and the Congress to create an exit strategy to end the “military occupation” of Iraq.
- A resolution to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with new attacks on curricula, policies, and practices that support gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender students, families, and staff in public schools.
Clearly, the NEA has become just another labor union, just another liberal pressure group, just another propaganda tool of the Democratic Party. For many, what used to be a great and noble profession has become just another refuge for disgruntled whiners and malcontents.
It’s time we reminded teachers and school administrators that it is their job to do what taxpayers pay them to do, not what leftist ideologues in Washington might want. But more importantly, it’s time that parents began to take an active interest in the quality of the education their children are receiving. It’s time they demanded that the schools elevate their level of expectation of student scholastic performance – whether the kids like it or not. And if some teachers are more committed to the political agenda of the radical left than they are to educating our children, then it’s time to toss them, and the NEA, out the door.
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