Chapter 54.5: Quality Counts

A new report has me more concerned about the state of education in this country than I already was. I’ve always appreciated that I grew up in an educated, inquisitive family in an area that was also well-educated and populated with folks who had a similar educational foundation. In short, I grew up with a lot of smart people.

While I understand intellectually that not everyone is as fortunate as I am in this regard, the findings of Quality Counts 2007 are staggering. It’s bad enough that the state-by-state analysis shows that the luck of the draw can hamstring a child’s development (God forbid you grow up in the beautiful state of New Mexico, it seems to say), but what’s worse is that even some states that “excel” relative to the others don’t always post impressive numbers. The top state in middle-school math, for example, is Massachusetts, where less than half of students meet NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) standards. In Washington, D.C., the figures are abysmal – less than 7 percent!

I fear the level of mathematics knowledge has dwindled to near innumeracy. Ask most kids the difference between the mean and the median and you might consider yourself lucky if they knew one of them meant "the average." The strong students are better educated; for the average ones, it seems to be a matter of where you live and whether you had a strong enough grammar school experience to create an academic foundation for the future. And with the state of public education in many areas of the country being so horrible, we're in danger of developing an enormous number of youth in this generation who don't know how to think through problems far more challenging than what a statistical midpoint is called.

I’m not afraid for the smart students, the kids on the far end of the bell curve. I’m afraid for those in the middle. They are by definition the majority of students, and if we can’t educate them better, then the consequences for the future are harrowing.

Who or what is to blame? Is the curriculum too hard? I doubt it –- life is only getting more complicated as we strive to create more convenience for ourselves. Are teachers worse? Perhaps, but they’re also products of our education system -– it’s a chicken/egg argument that isn’t feeding anyone’s imagination to solve the problem. Public policy? State initiatives? Federal initiatives? Yes to all, but it’s still not enough. The thing that galls me most is there are a lot of smart people trying to solve this problem, and no one has an answer that doesn’t involve leaving a lot of children and young adults educationally destitute. I’m open to suggestions. Personally, I’m going to learn how to tutor someone and start there.