How Long Have We Been Slipping, and How Far Have We Fallen?

When did the bell curve shift? When did an A become Average. When did the process of evaluation start at the top and deduct from it rather than starting in the middle, at the true average, and adjusting based on competency, or lack there of, and excellence? Why have we decided to lower the bar to a place where we reward the lazy and incompetent and do not adequately reward the brilliant and exceptional?

This wasn't an overnight transition, people. We created this problem. We allowed it to happen. How on Earth can an 18 year old high school graduate not know what a verb is? How is that possible? How could we have failed our students so greatly that the basic understanding of our own language is missing? I remember people talking about lost knowledge back when I was in high school. People being concerned that students didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was signed, or being able to locate Austria on a map. When I was in college I remember hearing baffled scholars mocking how high school graduates didn't know who fought in the Civil War, or how to locate China on a map. Now we have to worry about students not knowing what part of speech "War" is and how to locate The United States on a map. What the hell is going on here?

How could we have shifted so far away from supporting our public school systems that one third of every Freshmen class at my institution doesn't have basic, fundamental English skills. They are tested for reading comprehension and writing proficiency, but they don't even know the different parts of speech, let alone how to apply them in a sentence, how to ensure they are used correctly, how to maintain tense or voice, or create proper subject/verb agreements. The disparity between the private school educated and the public school graduated is such a vast chasm that post secondary educational system is being forced to accept highly unprepared students into their ranks just to pay the bills. The system is forced to reward mediocrity with recognition and not allowed to foster true knowledge or discourse because the basics have to be covered again. New classes have to be introduced to bring those students up to speed. Even the grand Ivy League has seen a downturn in the quality of the student body. Everyone's scale has been lowered. The bulge of the bell curve now hovers over an A- rather than situating itself firmly over the C average. And it isn't because we have gotten better, it is because we got so much worse that the only way to address the frustration was to change how we graded.

And it doesn't stop there. This morning I was listening to Fareed Zakaria on a local radio station and was stunned to hear that in 2013, 75% of all PhDs awarded in this country will be awarded to foreign students. Seventy-five percent. To me this makes two comments. The first, we still have the educational system in place to provide a top-notch, globally beneficial education. The second, we just don't have American students willing to do the work.

What are we doing to ourselves? I know too many public school teachers to have complaint with them. It isn't the quality of instructor that is the problem. The problem is the infrastructure of the public educational system. We have fostered overcrowded classrooms, antiquated equipment, absent materials, standardized evaluation, and lack-luster results. The concept of "no child left behind" in reality is more like "every child left behind." Because when you can't instill the basics as early, you can't teach the more advanced later. Which means that even students who would be capable of it are being held to the lower standard because that is the majority standard. Rather than accepting some children will fail (which can be healthy for them, by the way) we are shifting the scale to emphasize pushing the scrapers through and shoving the truly talented into a pool of mediocrity.

Which is exactly why the private school educated students are going to run this country. And that is a horrendous thought from the perspective of the existing biases and disparities that allowed them to attend the private school in the first place. I know several middle class families where the parents work several jobs each to ensure that their kids can go to private school, because if they don't, they fear for their future. But our school system has the potential to be magnificent if we would focus on it. If we don't, we will not only lose our "Superpower" status as a nation, we will lose our integrity, our influence, and our potential. There is so much good that we could do as a nation that watching us squander our future is making me physically ill. If we don't change, and soon, we won't be able to recover.