Public education is PC-centric
By:
LeRoy Goldman
Columnist
BluRidgeNow Online
March 18, 2018
Long ago, my parents taught me that America’s future was its children, and that getting a good education was the path forward. They also taught me that the person most responsible for getting there was me. That was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
My 10th-grade English class was a writing class taught by Miss Irene Jennings. She was so short we called her “The Mouse.” She was a strict disciplinarian — in my mind, a tyrant. I didn’t like her, and I had no interest in learning how to write well.
The conflict came to a head early. She returned a writing assignment of mine with an “F.” I knew I had given the assignment short shrift, but I also knew it was of “C” quality. When I confronted her after class, she agreed with me, but she said I was capable of far better, that I was lazy, and that she would continue to fail me until I performed up to my potential.
At dinner that night, I vented my outrage to my parents. My dad said we would go and talk to her. She told us what she had told me. He thanked her and we departed. I felt vindicated until my dad unloaded on me. He told me he wanted to see every one of my writing assignments from that point forward. I was trapped. My final grade in English that semester was a “B” — an earned “B.”
Although it took me time to realize it, The Mouse and my Dad had taught me an invaluable lesson, one far more important than writing.
Can you imagine what would happen if a modern-day teacher deliberately failed an under-performing, able student? She would be crucified — by the parents, the PTA, the school administration, the school board and political correctness advocates of all stripes. And that means teachers today and the systems in which they work have capitulated to an evil that casts a dark cloud over not only public education but also over the competence of the nation’s citizens and future leaders.
Political correctness has seeped into the nation’s education system at every level. Its effects are ubiquitous and deleterious. It travels on cat’s paws unless challenged. When challenged, it goes to DEFCON 1, charging those who have the temerity to confront it with discrimination, its ultimate weapon.
National education policy and local school performance have been transmogrified by political correctness. The worst of it dates to the enactment in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act that passed Congress with large bipartisan majorities and was signed into law by President George W. Bush. At the signing ceremony, the president said that “you must show us whether or not every child is learning.”
By the time Barack Obama took office, it was clear the law was not working well. Another bipartisan bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by him. Predictably, it retained the previous statute’s fatal flaw.
The current law is called the Every Student Succeeds Act. It supposedly will work because it gives individual school districts more flexibility about things like student testing. Don’t bet any of the ranch on that outcome.
The real problem, which the doctrine of political correctness deliberately disguises, is that there are too many schools, too many teachers and too many students who are destined to fail, regardless of how much money is available. Accepting that reality, while striving to open the door to success for every student who is willing and able to succeed, is essential to put public education back on the right track.
When federal law proceeds from the precept that NO child shall be left behind, or that EVERY student must succeed, it means the central focus of the school administrators, the PTA, the elected school board and, most importantly, the teachers is on the least-able, worst-performing students. That’s because unless they perform, the teachers and the schools are in jeopardy.
That’s the insidious way bureaucracies work. That’s political correctness gone mad!
Economics professor Walter Williams of George Mason University has written that many college-bound high school graduates are not prepared for or belong in college. Many must take remedial courses, and many of those never graduate. But admitting such students, Williams wrote, “gets the nation’s high schools off the hook. ... (They) can continue to deliver grossly fraudulent education — namely, issue diplomas that attest that students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level when they may not be able to perform at even an eighth- or ninth-grade level.”
Thank God for Miss Jennings, the Mouse who really roared, and the public education system that supported her.
