The Dumbing-Down of America

According to Pat Buchannan, fifty years ago this October, Americans were jolted by the news that Moscow, one year after drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood, had put an 80-pound satellite into Earth orbit.
In December, the U.S. Navy tried to replicate the feat. Vanguard got four feet off the ground and exploded, incinerating its three-pound payload. America was humiliated. Khrushchev was Man of the Year. Some of us yet recall the Vanguard newsreels and the humiliating laughter.
Stunned, America went to work to improve education in math and science, and succeeded. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of high school seniors began to rise, reaching a high in 1964.
However, test scores for high school students have been falling now for 40 years. In 1984, the Reagan administration issued "A Nation at Risk," documenting the deterioration of American public education.
More trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem. And if one judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made marvelous progress. On March 4, The Washington Times reported:
"In 2005, 17 percent of graduates had completed a 'standard' curriculum, 41 percent completed a 'midlevel' curriculum, and 10 percent completed a 'rigorous' curriculum. Fifteen years earlier, the percentages were 9 percent (standard), 26 percent (midlevel) and 5 percent (rigorous). Grade point averages (GPA) increased, as well. The average overall GPA increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 (virtually a B level) in 2005.
However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the performances of high school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card." An NAEP test of 12th-grade achievement was given to what The New York Times called a "representative sample of 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005."
What did the tests reveal?
-- Since 1990, the share of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20 percent to 27 percent.
-- Only 35 percent of high school seniors have reached a "proficient" level in reading, down from 40 percent.
-- Only 16 percent of black and 20 percent of Hispanic students had reached a proficient level in reading.
-- Among high school seniors, only 29 percent of whites, 10 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of black students were proficient in math.



Anna Nicole Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan
Born Vickie Lynn and raised in Texas, Smith dropped out of high school like most of her peers and first married at the age of 17.
This is only the half of it. Among the kids whose test scores on reading and math were not factored in were the 25 percent of white students and 50 percent of black and Hispanic kids who had dropped out by senior year.
Factor the dropouts back in, and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black kids starting in first grade, about one in eight will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and one in 33 will be able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, one in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only one in 20 will be able to do high-school math.
Yet, as columnist Steve Sailor writes on VDare.com, the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014."



We're not going to make it. We're not even going to come close. American schools have become "killing fields". Students are afraid to go to school. Some students are afraid they will not live through the day. They are afraid of each other. Even teachers are afraid of some students. Teachers must spend so much time on discipline, there is no time or energy left for academics.
The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado, near Denver and Littleton. Two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding 24 others, before committing suicide. It is considered to be the deadliest school shooting and the second deadliest attack on a school in United States history after the Bath School disaster.

The massacre provoked debate regarding gun control laws, the availability of firearms in the United States, and gun violence involving youths. Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques and bullying, as well as the role of violent movies and video games in American society. Several of the victims, who were portrayed as having been killed for their religious beliefs, became a source of inspiration to others, and some lamented the decline of religion in public education and society in general, often blaming the tragedy on insufficient government endorsement of religion. The shooting also resulted in an increased emphasis on school security.

The Platte Canyon High School shooting was an incident that occurred at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, on September 27, 2006. 53-year-old[1] Duane Roger Morrison entered the school building, claiming to be carrying a bomb. He was initially reported as a bearded 35-year-old man with a camouflage backpack[2] and dark hooded sweatshirt.[3] Morrison took six female students hostage and sexually assaulted them, later releasing four. When police entered the classroom, Morrison opened fire before shooting hostage Emily Keyes in the head. The other remaining hostage escaped unharmed, and paramedics confirmed that Morrison had committed suicide.

The Amish school shooting occurred on the morning of Monday, October 2, 2006, when a gunman took hostages and eventually killed five girls (aged 7–13) and then killed himself at West Nickel Mines School, a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, United States.[1][2][3][4][5] Police report that the gunman was Charles Carl Roberts IV,[5][6] a 32-year-old milk-tank truck driver who lived nearby.

The Lancaster County shooting was the third deadly school shooting in the U.S. in less than a week.


A 16-year-old schoolgirl was killed in Bailey, Colorado, the week before when a gunman took six hostages at a school before opening fire and turning the gun on himself as police stormed a classroom.


Then the principal of a Wisconsin high school, shot by a student on Friday, died of his wounds a day later.


Pennsylvania is one state that has had its share of school violence. In April 2003, a 14-year-old boy fatally shot his school principal in the chest with one gun and then shot himself in the head with another in the Red Lion Area Junior High School cafeteria packed with students. This incident took place in York County, which borders Lancaster County. York County was also the site of a machete attack on a kindergarten class that wounded 11 children, the principal, and two teachers at Winterstown Elementary School in February 2001.
On March 7, 2007 a 17-year-old boy shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend at a central Michigan high school before fatally shooting himself in the head, police said.

The late-morning incident took place in a parking lot outside the cafeteria at H.H. Dow High School in Midland, said Deputy Chief Bob Lane of the Midland Police Department.

The shooter, who was not a student at H.H. Dow, had called his ex-girlfriend, a 17-year-old student at the school, asking her to meet him in the parking lot, he said.

The girl's mother was present when he shot her four times and then shot himself, Lane said. She was in serious condition but her injuries were not considered life-threatening, Lane said.

Violence is not limited to high school campuses. On Monday, 16 April 2007, almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High School masacre, a gunman(described as "Asian man, about 23, wearing a maroon hat, black leather jacket.") opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech on Monday, killing 32 people and wounding another 21 before he was killed. The shooting started around 7:15 a.m. at a dorm, where one person was killed. More than an hour later, wearing an ammo vest, the gunman went classroom to classroom in an engineering building shooting at will.
Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus. Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.



Cho Seung-Hui
Virginia Tech police on 17 April 2007 identified the shooter who took 32 lives as well as his own Monday as student Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, a South Korean national and permanent resident alien.
Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is about 160 miles west of Richmond. With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state's largest full-time student population. It is best known for its engineering school

Why are so many Americans ignorant of the depths of failure of so many schools? As Sailor explains, it is due to government deceit.
"Not surprisingly, practically ever single state cheats in order to meet the law" mandating a rising academic proficiency.
"For example, Mississippi ... recently declared that 89 percent of its fourth-graders were at least 'proficient' in reading.
"Unfortunately, however, on the federal government's impartial National Assessment of Education Progress test, only 18 percent of Mississippi students were 'proficient' or 'advanced.'"
Hence, a huge slice of the U.S. educational establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud that, if you did it in business, would get you several years at the nearby minimum security facility.






This is corruption.
Teachers are handing out grades kids do not deserve. States are dumbing-down tests to make themselves look good. Voters are being deceived about how much kids are learning.
There is no real moral distinction between what teachers and educators are doing on a vast scale and what professional athletes do on a smaller scale when they take steroids to enhance performance.


As The Washington Times noted, according to the Digest of Education Statistics, spending for public education, in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, rose from $6,256 a year per student before "A Nation at Risk" to $10,464 in the 2002-2003 school year. Taxpayers have thus raised their annual contribution to education by a full two-thirds in real dollars in a quarter century. More than generous.
Under George W. Bush, U.S. Department of Education funding has risen 92 percent in six years, from $35.5 billion in 2001 to $68 billion in 2007. Sinking test scores are what we have to show for it.
Taxpayers are being lied to and swindled by the education industry, which has failed them, failed America and flunked its assignment -- and should be expelled for cheating.

In China the picture is much different.
Students are eager to learn. Admission offices are inundated on the first day of school. Students are eager to complete the admissions forms.



Discipline in Chinese schools is very high. Students engage in group social activities. They exercise together each morning before the start of classes.
On a recent trip to China, I was allowed to interact with the students in a Hotung School. We read a dialogue in the reading class. All Chinese students are being required to learn English and one other foreign language in addition to their own language and a dialect.


China is our next global competitor.





The threat to America is much greater today than when the Russsians put up Sputnik. We are facing competition from many nations where education is still a priority.








Muslim countries value education and discipline. In this Global economy jobs are being out-sourced to India and Pakistan because American are not qualified to perform them. Aside from economics, and cost savings, there is the competency factor to consider.
The War on Terror must be fought on more fields than just the battle field. While we are trying to win the hearts and minds of the children of our enemies, we must not neglect the minds of our own children. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.